So I haven't posted anything in a while, and well frankly, I'll just say that I've felt really under appreciated for the past couple of weeks. But before that it was just that I was really busy with finals and all that. But I would've posted right after except for just that one feeling that nobody cares anyway. You know? I'm sure that a lot of people have come to a certain point in their life where they just start to feel like, "What is the point of doing this anymore?"
I mean, for real, the whole reason I started this is because when I started talking to my friend Aurielle about the previous story, it really made a difference in her life and the lives of the people that were around at the time. That was really encouraging. So I felt that the revealing thoughts that I had about life, if shared with the rest of the world might help someone along, cuz I know that I'm like one of maybe a few hundred people in the U.S. that actually thinks deeply and at length about the things that matter in life. But I started to realize, or feel like, "Who is ever going to read this and say, 'Whoa! That just blew my mind out of the frickin water." Am I ever going to have that kind of impact on the world?
That's what I want is, to be the person that allows himself to be the instrument of awakening to the modern world today. And then I started to realize something even better, and this might piss a lot of people off but I'm beyond caring. The MAJOR TRUTH of it all is that, I can not write about life and how to live it. I can not write out my in depth, truth revealing thoughts. And I can not be that instrument without including into every aspect of my life the truth that is.........are you ready for this?..........
GOD!
And a lot of people will not understand this, but I have been right so far about everything I talked about previously otherwise you would not still be reading. God is, has been, and will continue to be the center of all existence. There is nothing that lives, breaths, shines, swims, walks, runs, grows, laughs, cries, shakes, stands still, sits, flows, sleeps, or even craps, without the Almighty God giving the say so. GOD and only God is the very center of every one's life, and He is all that is important to everyone in the entire world.
The only differences between myself and those of you that will object to this is that I realize this fact and accept it and am in love with it and live my every waking moment and breath in awe of it. Where as you see this and some of you will realize the truth of this fact and run the other way. You do this because you are scared, you may not realize it but you are. You are scared of the fact that your life is not under your own control or that there is a higher power up there and that you haven't done enough in your life to appease it and you're afraid that it maybe to late for you. These are fears not based on truth but based on uncertainty. What you need to understand is that, God made you and brought you into existence, He does not hate and could never hate you and you could never do enough wrong where it would not be forgiven. It just wouldn't make sense, why would the creator hate his own creation? Duh. And this same God that created and loves you is in control of your life and all things involved and He knows what He's doing. He will not let you go through something that He thinks is unnecessary.
Some of you don't even realize this fact of God's importance yet because you don't want to, you've put blinders on your eyes and you only look where you've been taught to, right into those textbooks. Take off the blinders, look around you, the evidence for God is all around you if you don't see it then you are limiting yourself to stupidity. There is more than intelligent design all around you even in the mirror every morning, more than intelligent design, it's unfathomably and infinitely more intricate than we could ever hope to discover or learn about in a thousand lifetimes from now. Just OPEN YOUR EYES.
And the rest of you, I don't know if you'll ever find real meaning in life because you realize how the importance of God in your life and you fight it tooth and nail, down to the bone. And I very much believe that you would do it even until your dying breath. And this saddens me because you will go through life looking for something to live for only to be let down time and time again and if you do not get severely depressed along the way I guarantee that at the end of your life you will be more depressed than anyone cares to think about. Because you will either be the person described previously or you will be the person that pushes everyone away when something fails and ends up telling everyone to f**k off, and by the end of your life I doubt that you will have even 10 people that even care if you're alive or not. Your life will be forgotten eventually. Why? Because you never did anything or lived for anything that had any meaning. And as I've already gone over, ONLY GOD WILL EVER HAVE ANY MEANING AT ALL FOREVER TIMES INFINITY.
So from now on I will be including all of the thoughts that I have about life and I can assure you that most of them will include, if they are not entirely about, The Almighty God. Don't like it? You might as well deal with it now, cuz you're gonna have to one of these days. BAM!!!
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
And With My Dying Breath
Alright so I've decided that I'm not going to make this a regular thing, at least not till after finals, maybe. This decision is only because of two things, one: I am way too tired from school to use my brain anymore than I have to. And two: nobody really reads these anyway so I'm not sure how many people care that I'm not keeping to a regular posting schedual.
Anyway continuing on with what I was talking about last week, anger. Yeah bad stuff, we went through that. I told you that anger was completely unnessasary. Why do I think this way? We are all products of our environment and our biological makeup. Since I was not born with an immunity to anger, we can assume that something big happened to make me this way. You would be right.
I want to begin this by telling you why I'm asking you to read. Because it is my belief that life is to short to get angry. I believe that we as people, maybe more so as Americans, get caught up in the things that don't matter in the grand scheme of things. We don't live as big picture people. And therefore we waste our lives worring about things that we have no control over. Or we strive for things that won't be worth anything to anyone once we no longer exist. This is a lesson of sorts. You can read it and not be effected, as I can assume will be the result for the majority of people reading. Or you can take it to heart and apply it to your own life in some way or another, as I hope most of you will do.
So I once upon a time I used to have a pretty close relationship with my brother. But somewhere along the line things went wrong. If I knew what it was that changed things for the worst then I might've been able to fix things. But I was about 13 or 14 and I just didn't care.
My brother was always getting angry about the smallest things, anything and everything that most of us would just shrug off and forget about he would blow out of the water and make a huge deal about it. And the only things that really got me pissed off back then were people making a big deal out of things and ruining an otherwise peaceful environment. That and people who refuse to just get along with other people. Ironically, those were the two things that I often did all by myself by getting pissed off about it. But my brother was one of the only people I've ever known to get so angry about things that were so small without any warning whatsoever, aside from a 3 or 4 yr old. And as you might imagine, with him doing the only things that really pissed me off, we got into a lot of fights.
When I was between the ages of 12 and 14 we exchanged bloody noses, bruised ribs, and countless holes in walls and doors. He was the cause of some of those but the most of the damage was my doing. I'm not sure why, but whenever we would get into these fist fights he would run for the couch, his bed, or my parents bed, and just lay there as if it were base or to somehow make himself seem innocent of provoking me in the first place, or something, I honestly can't figure it out.
On the night that it all happened, I was in my dad's office on the computer, doing homework or something. And I remember hearing my dad come home from getting pizza, which was a treat cuz we hardly ever ate out as a family. He set the pizza down, and my brother came over and looked at it and started to get upset with my dad. What did he get angry about this time? It wasn't the pizza he wanted, even though when my dad asked what kind of pizza he liked, he said he didn't care. So I was sitting there trying to ignore all the yelling and screaming that was going on over the pizza. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t help but get angry too. And as my brother was yelling at my dad out the door so he would go back and get the "right" pizza. He came inside and slammed the door. The walls shook and I snapped. I ran out of the office and got in my brother's face, pushed him up against a wall and to told him to chill the frick out, but with more colorful language. There were no parents around and my sister kept to herself in her room, so I had free reign to do whatever I wanted to him and no one could stop me. I felt the raw untamed power start to swell in my head. So I kept on yelling at him, and took it further, I told him something to the effect that if he didn't frickin stop with this bullcrap I was gonna beat him bloody with a baseball bat, again, more colorful language was used during all of this. As you can imagine, he didn’t like that all that much so he started pushing me up against the opposite wall. And as I hit the wall I punched him in the gut really frickin hard and then pushed him back really hard. That's when he ran. Straight to my parents bedroom. I'm not completely sure how it all happened but I know this, I ran after him intent on killing him or at least bringing him close to it either way I was doin serious damage. So as he lay there on my parents’ bed, the only thought I had was that I was going to do a pile driver and drive my elbow through his face. So I leapt...
So my parents bedroom is set up so that if they were sitting up in bed they would be facing the door to the living room and kitchen, a dresser with a mirror straight in front of them, there would be a window to the right of them and to the immediate right of where my dad slept there was a lamp that we had owned since we moved from California sitting in the corner. This lamp was like any other, except that it had a nightstand of sorts right in the midsection of it.
And where was my brother was lying? Right next to the lamp, right where my dad sleeps. So there I am in midair and something happened, no matter what happened it was my own doing, I either got repelled away from and over him or I just straight up missed and over shot. But there were no thoughts between my leaving the floor and then my head reconnecting with it.
The next thing that I knew I'm on my back with my legs up in the air up against the wall and I feel like I’m in a Quentin Tarantino movie. My neck was squirting blood, I couldn't see it but I could feel it. I knew that if I didn't slow the bleeding that it wouldn't be long before I bled to death. I almost passed out on the way to my parents bathroom to shove cotton balls in my neck. I yelled at my brother and sister to call 911 and then go across the street to get our neighbor who was a nurse, as they were both freaking out. I knew that I couldn't show it otherwise everyone would lose it and nothing would get done and I would die, but I was screaming inside.
Scared for my life, my heart was racing, and my knees got weak. I had to lie down. I had to close my eyes. Feeling so faint. No energy. So cold.
*****************************************************************************
My neighbor came over and stayed with me, she was freaking out inside too but trying to stay calm on the outside, but it showed. All I could do was let tears run down my face; "I don’t want to die, not yet." But I knew I was going to die, something had to happen fast. The paramedics were taking so long. It might be too late. It was getting harder to breath, every breath that I took felt like breathing in poison. I don't know how long I can hold on. The paramedics got there right before my parents got home. And they walked in just as I was getting wheeled out on a gurney into the ambulance. The ambulance drove me to a helicopter, when I was in the helicopter, I couldn’t help but think about my life and how short it had been, it’s true what they say, when you’re about to die your whole life flashes before your eyes, everyone you care about and the things you're leaving behind. It was a short flash. Then I realized that I had done nothing of value, that if I were to die that night that my life would have no long term significant value. Tears running down my face. Was it God’s will that I die tonight? And then I had a thought, so what if it was? If it’s God’s will that I die tonight, then does it really matter what I want? God has a purpose for everything and if my death can positively impact someone for Christ then I will gladly give it up. My life was in God's hands now, and I had shaking feeling so cold and so scared. When I realized, at 13 yrs old, that my life was not my own that God was truly in control. My breathing started to become more regular, my hands and feet started to feel warmer and it traveled up my arms and legs, still scared but a lot calmer. We landed at a hospital in Chandler and they wheeled me to the operating room. Still scared, is it my time? This is it, 10...9...8...7... Passed out.
I woke up in a hospital room with people I knew around me. I don't know who was there first, my concept of time at that point was all distorted. But Jeremiah, my mom and dad, and a few people from church came to see me. I was pretty drugged up on morpheme. And I couldn't move my neck. The nurse came in a bit later and told me that the cut to my neck came within a few centimeters of my corroded artery and messed up one of my salavary glands. She said that if it had gone 4 centimeters deeper there would've been no way to save me. That was definitely an act of God to teach me a lesson in extreme way. It was as if at the exact moment I left the ground to attack my brother He pressed pause, came in and moved me into just the right position for all of this to happen. He could’ve done it a different way, sure, but this way I have something to show for it. This way, I have something to talk about. From that point on I decided to never get angry again unless it was about something that really mattered. My reasoning: if it's not worth dying or almost dying for then it's not worth getting angry about. We got home and I saw my parents comforter and one wall had been soaked in my blood and in the garage was the lamp. And it had one piece of glass on it sticking out like a scythe, as if it was the last piece that was determined to exist for the sole purpose of threatening my life. So now here I am, I have a scar on my neck that limits my range of motion, that side of my neck stings when something is too spicy or too sweet, and my face near the back of my jaw bone can't feel anything but pressure. But I'm a better person for it and I have yet to get very angry about anything that wasn't of top priority.
Take a page out of my book and stop getting angry. Don't let it take something seemingly drastic to show you that you're just being stupid.
Anyway continuing on with what I was talking about last week, anger. Yeah bad stuff, we went through that. I told you that anger was completely unnessasary. Why do I think this way? We are all products of our environment and our biological makeup. Since I was not born with an immunity to anger, we can assume that something big happened to make me this way. You would be right.
I want to begin this by telling you why I'm asking you to read. Because it is my belief that life is to short to get angry. I believe that we as people, maybe more so as Americans, get caught up in the things that don't matter in the grand scheme of things. We don't live as big picture people. And therefore we waste our lives worring about things that we have no control over. Or we strive for things that won't be worth anything to anyone once we no longer exist. This is a lesson of sorts. You can read it and not be effected, as I can assume will be the result for the majority of people reading. Or you can take it to heart and apply it to your own life in some way or another, as I hope most of you will do.
So I once upon a time I used to have a pretty close relationship with my brother. But somewhere along the line things went wrong. If I knew what it was that changed things for the worst then I might've been able to fix things. But I was about 13 or 14 and I just didn't care.
My brother was always getting angry about the smallest things, anything and everything that most of us would just shrug off and forget about he would blow out of the water and make a huge deal about it. And the only things that really got me pissed off back then were people making a big deal out of things and ruining an otherwise peaceful environment. That and people who refuse to just get along with other people. Ironically, those were the two things that I often did all by myself by getting pissed off about it. But my brother was one of the only people I've ever known to get so angry about things that were so small without any warning whatsoever, aside from a 3 or 4 yr old. And as you might imagine, with him doing the only things that really pissed me off, we got into a lot of fights.
When I was between the ages of 12 and 14 we exchanged bloody noses, bruised ribs, and countless holes in walls and doors. He was the cause of some of those but the most of the damage was my doing. I'm not sure why, but whenever we would get into these fist fights he would run for the couch, his bed, or my parents bed, and just lay there as if it were base or to somehow make himself seem innocent of provoking me in the first place, or something, I honestly can't figure it out.
On the night that it all happened, I was in my dad's office on the computer, doing homework or something. And I remember hearing my dad come home from getting pizza, which was a treat cuz we hardly ever ate out as a family. He set the pizza down, and my brother came over and looked at it and started to get upset with my dad. What did he get angry about this time? It wasn't the pizza he wanted, even though when my dad asked what kind of pizza he liked, he said he didn't care. So I was sitting there trying to ignore all the yelling and screaming that was going on over the pizza. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t help but get angry too. And as my brother was yelling at my dad out the door so he would go back and get the "right" pizza. He came inside and slammed the door. The walls shook and I snapped. I ran out of the office and got in my brother's face, pushed him up against a wall and to told him to chill the frick out, but with more colorful language. There were no parents around and my sister kept to herself in her room, so I had free reign to do whatever I wanted to him and no one could stop me. I felt the raw untamed power start to swell in my head. So I kept on yelling at him, and took it further, I told him something to the effect that if he didn't frickin stop with this bullcrap I was gonna beat him bloody with a baseball bat, again, more colorful language was used during all of this. As you can imagine, he didn’t like that all that much so he started pushing me up against the opposite wall. And as I hit the wall I punched him in the gut really frickin hard and then pushed him back really hard. That's when he ran. Straight to my parents bedroom. I'm not completely sure how it all happened but I know this, I ran after him intent on killing him or at least bringing him close to it either way I was doin serious damage. So as he lay there on my parents’ bed, the only thought I had was that I was going to do a pile driver and drive my elbow through his face. So I leapt...
So my parents bedroom is set up so that if they were sitting up in bed they would be facing the door to the living room and kitchen, a dresser with a mirror straight in front of them, there would be a window to the right of them and to the immediate right of where my dad slept there was a lamp that we had owned since we moved from California sitting in the corner. This lamp was like any other, except that it had a nightstand of sorts right in the midsection of it.
And where was my brother was lying? Right next to the lamp, right where my dad sleeps. So there I am in midair and something happened, no matter what happened it was my own doing, I either got repelled away from and over him or I just straight up missed and over shot. But there were no thoughts between my leaving the floor and then my head reconnecting with it.
The next thing that I knew I'm on my back with my legs up in the air up against the wall and I feel like I’m in a Quentin Tarantino movie. My neck was squirting blood, I couldn't see it but I could feel it. I knew that if I didn't slow the bleeding that it wouldn't be long before I bled to death. I almost passed out on the way to my parents bathroom to shove cotton balls in my neck. I yelled at my brother and sister to call 911 and then go across the street to get our neighbor who was a nurse, as they were both freaking out. I knew that I couldn't show it otherwise everyone would lose it and nothing would get done and I would die, but I was screaming inside.
Scared for my life, my heart was racing, and my knees got weak. I had to lie down. I had to close my eyes. Feeling so faint. No energy. So cold.
*****************************************************************************
My neighbor came over and stayed with me, she was freaking out inside too but trying to stay calm on the outside, but it showed. All I could do was let tears run down my face; "I don’t want to die, not yet." But I knew I was going to die, something had to happen fast. The paramedics were taking so long. It might be too late. It was getting harder to breath, every breath that I took felt like breathing in poison. I don't know how long I can hold on. The paramedics got there right before my parents got home. And they walked in just as I was getting wheeled out on a gurney into the ambulance. The ambulance drove me to a helicopter, when I was in the helicopter, I couldn’t help but think about my life and how short it had been, it’s true what they say, when you’re about to die your whole life flashes before your eyes, everyone you care about and the things you're leaving behind. It was a short flash. Then I realized that I had done nothing of value, that if I were to die that night that my life would have no long term significant value. Tears running down my face. Was it God’s will that I die tonight? And then I had a thought, so what if it was? If it’s God’s will that I die tonight, then does it really matter what I want? God has a purpose for everything and if my death can positively impact someone for Christ then I will gladly give it up. My life was in God's hands now, and I had shaking feeling so cold and so scared. When I realized, at 13 yrs old, that my life was not my own that God was truly in control. My breathing started to become more regular, my hands and feet started to feel warmer and it traveled up my arms and legs, still scared but a lot calmer. We landed at a hospital in Chandler and they wheeled me to the operating room. Still scared, is it my time? This is it, 10...9...8...7... Passed out.
I woke up in a hospital room with people I knew around me. I don't know who was there first, my concept of time at that point was all distorted. But Jeremiah, my mom and dad, and a few people from church came to see me. I was pretty drugged up on morpheme. And I couldn't move my neck. The nurse came in a bit later and told me that the cut to my neck came within a few centimeters of my corroded artery and messed up one of my salavary glands. She said that if it had gone 4 centimeters deeper there would've been no way to save me. That was definitely an act of God to teach me a lesson in extreme way. It was as if at the exact moment I left the ground to attack my brother He pressed pause, came in and moved me into just the right position for all of this to happen. He could’ve done it a different way, sure, but this way I have something to show for it. This way, I have something to talk about. From that point on I decided to never get angry again unless it was about something that really mattered. My reasoning: if it's not worth dying or almost dying for then it's not worth getting angry about. We got home and I saw my parents comforter and one wall had been soaked in my blood and in the garage was the lamp. And it had one piece of glass on it sticking out like a scythe, as if it was the last piece that was determined to exist for the sole purpose of threatening my life. So now here I am, I have a scar on my neck that limits my range of motion, that side of my neck stings when something is too spicy or too sweet, and my face near the back of my jaw bone can't feel anything but pressure. But I'm a better person for it and I have yet to get very angry about anything that wasn't of top priority.
Take a page out of my book and stop getting angry. Don't let it take something seemingly drastic to show you that you're just being stupid.
Friday, April 23, 2010
So Angry That It's Ridiculous
So second one of the week, I'm gonna get straight to it. People are stupid. I don't understand it. To a certain degree I can see the reason people are the way they are but I don't completely understand why it's so hard to see the things that I see and to learn the things I've learned. I mean they seem pretty basic to me. I don't know. One of the biggest things that gets me is people's constant need to be angry or show rage and aggression. Don't get it anymore, it's like people don't even think anymore. Are there moments where people just voluntarily shut off their brains? Do people want to be stupid? In a way, maybe they do. I can honestly say that sometimes I get to the point where I don't want to feel good. It's like, "Shut up, just let me be sad (or mad)" You know?
Unfortunately both feelings are highly destructive to everyone around you. Emotions are contagious, and if you have children they're even more dangerous, because children can pick up the emotions you show, if you're an angry person most of the time then they will learn to fear you or they will learn to be aggressive as a way to get what they want. Both, down the road, will put strains on your relationship as they put strains on all relationships that have had time to mature. Sadness is one of those emotions that you can never really predict when it will show up, because things happen, the world is a sad place it's not all rainbows and butterflies. But anger is one of the things that's more than controllable, it's completely unnecessary.
Now I know, what's going on in your head now, "What about when people are annoying, or I have a bad day, or what if I'm just under a lot of stress?" None of those are good reasons to get angry. If people are annoying, then be annoyed. If you're having a bad day, do something to make it better, it's not everyone else's fault that things are effecting you negatively. If you're under a lot of stress, be stressed, it's ok. These feelings aren't bad all by themselves, it's when you start taking it out on other people or you just start having a bad attitude is when it starts to be a problem. Still not convinced that you have a problem. Anger is a word that is overly used so I'm not surprised. What most people don't understand is that anger in the true sense of the word is better described as, rage, fury, wrath, or resentment, all of which I'm 100% all of us have felt towards someone at one point or another. So don't even try to start lying to me, or more importantly yourself. I don't need to go into defining any of these because we already know how serious these are. Take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about anger.
The physical effects of anger include increased heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline. Anger becomes the predominant feeling behaviorally, cognitively, and physiologically when a person makes the conscious choice to take action to immediately stop the threatening behavior of another outside force. Anger can have many physical and mental consequences. While most of those who experience anger explain its arousal as a result of "what has happened to them," psychologists point out that an angry person can be very well mistaken because anger causes a loss in self-monitoring capacity and objective observability.
Modern psychologists have labeled two types of anger: Passive and Aggressive. What you need to understand is that one is not better than the other. They both have the same destructive power. What is deceiving about anger is that the damage that we inflict occurs beneath the skin.
Passive anger can be expressed in a few ways, those being: stockpiling resentments that are expressed behind people's backs, avoiding eye contact, putting people down, gossiping, apologizing too often, being overly critical, inviting criticism, setting yourself and others up for failure, choosing unreliable people to depend on, expressing frustration at insignificant things but ignoring serious ones, giving the cold shoulder or phony smiles, looking unconcerned, sitting on the fence while others sort things out, oversleeping, and not responding to another's anger.
Aggressive anger most of us are very familiar with. This comes in the form of: threats, physical violence, verbal abuse, punishing people for unwarranted deeds, destructiveness, bullying, playing on people's weaknesses, accusing other people for your own mistakes, blaming people for your own feelings, being over-punitive, refusing to forgive and forget, bringing up hurtful memories from the past, explosive rages over minor frustrations, and illogical arguments.
Everyone has done more than half of these things to express their anger, I'm sure of it. In reading those did you realize how many of those were unnecessary and ridiculous? You can try to justify your feeling of anger towards a person, all of us have done it/are doing it. What needs to be realized in this sense is that no one else is responsible for the way that you feel, even if you should have every right to be angry. You are the one that is in control of your own emotions, no one but you makes you angry. And being angry solves nothing, it only breeds more anger. It's a continual ridiculous circle, you get angry so someone else gets angry and strikes back, so you strike back, and so on and so on. It doesn't end till one of you gets tired and gives up. Nothing has been accomplished except that you proved who can be the angriest the longest. And when you think about it, THAT IS SO STUPID. Don't be stupid!! This is why in the last post I said that you need to start thinking about yourself objectively, because a lot of us don't know that we're being ridiculous, we're to focused on everything and everybody else that we haven't had time to figure out what is important and then do some repairative work on ourselves. Figure this out, do some self examination. I'll get back to you next week, cuz we're not done with this.
Source: Unknown Author. (2010). Anger. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anger. Last accessed 23 April 2010.
Unfortunately both feelings are highly destructive to everyone around you. Emotions are contagious, and if you have children they're even more dangerous, because children can pick up the emotions you show, if you're an angry person most of the time then they will learn to fear you or they will learn to be aggressive as a way to get what they want. Both, down the road, will put strains on your relationship as they put strains on all relationships that have had time to mature. Sadness is one of those emotions that you can never really predict when it will show up, because things happen, the world is a sad place it's not all rainbows and butterflies. But anger is one of the things that's more than controllable, it's completely unnecessary.
Now I know, what's going on in your head now, "What about when people are annoying, or I have a bad day, or what if I'm just under a lot of stress?" None of those are good reasons to get angry. If people are annoying, then be annoyed. If you're having a bad day, do something to make it better, it's not everyone else's fault that things are effecting you negatively. If you're under a lot of stress, be stressed, it's ok. These feelings aren't bad all by themselves, it's when you start taking it out on other people or you just start having a bad attitude is when it starts to be a problem. Still not convinced that you have a problem. Anger is a word that is overly used so I'm not surprised. What most people don't understand is that anger in the true sense of the word is better described as, rage, fury, wrath, or resentment, all of which I'm 100% all of us have felt towards someone at one point or another. So don't even try to start lying to me, or more importantly yourself. I don't need to go into defining any of these because we already know how serious these are. Take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about anger.
The physical effects of anger include increased heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline. Anger becomes the predominant feeling behaviorally, cognitively, and physiologically when a person makes the conscious choice to take action to immediately stop the threatening behavior of another outside force. Anger can have many physical and mental consequences. While most of those who experience anger explain its arousal as a result of "what has happened to them," psychologists point out that an angry person can be very well mistaken because anger causes a loss in self-monitoring capacity and objective observability.
Modern psychologists have labeled two types of anger: Passive and Aggressive. What you need to understand is that one is not better than the other. They both have the same destructive power. What is deceiving about anger is that the damage that we inflict occurs beneath the skin.
Passive anger can be expressed in a few ways, those being: stockpiling resentments that are expressed behind people's backs, avoiding eye contact, putting people down, gossiping, apologizing too often, being overly critical, inviting criticism, setting yourself and others up for failure, choosing unreliable people to depend on, expressing frustration at insignificant things but ignoring serious ones, giving the cold shoulder or phony smiles, looking unconcerned, sitting on the fence while others sort things out, oversleeping, and not responding to another's anger.
Aggressive anger most of us are very familiar with. This comes in the form of: threats, physical violence, verbal abuse, punishing people for unwarranted deeds, destructiveness, bullying, playing on people's weaknesses, accusing other people for your own mistakes, blaming people for your own feelings, being over-punitive, refusing to forgive and forget, bringing up hurtful memories from the past, explosive rages over minor frustrations, and illogical arguments.
Everyone has done more than half of these things to express their anger, I'm sure of it. In reading those did you realize how many of those were unnecessary and ridiculous? You can try to justify your feeling of anger towards a person, all of us have done it/are doing it. What needs to be realized in this sense is that no one else is responsible for the way that you feel, even if you should have every right to be angry. You are the one that is in control of your own emotions, no one but you makes you angry. And being angry solves nothing, it only breeds more anger. It's a continual ridiculous circle, you get angry so someone else gets angry and strikes back, so you strike back, and so on and so on. It doesn't end till one of you gets tired and gives up. Nothing has been accomplished except that you proved who can be the angriest the longest. And when you think about it, THAT IS SO STUPID. Don't be stupid!! This is why in the last post I said that you need to start thinking about yourself objectively, because a lot of us don't know that we're being ridiculous, we're to focused on everything and everybody else that we haven't had time to figure out what is important and then do some repairative work on ourselves. Figure this out, do some self examination. I'll get back to you next week, cuz we're not done with this.
Source: Unknown Author. (2010). Anger. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anger. Last accessed 23 April 2010.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Retrain Your Mind To Not Be Stupid
So I wrote a pretty good piece just a little while ago and when I went to go format it the stupid thing erased everything I wrote. Awesome, oh well. Alright, I'll try again.
So for those of you that care, sorry about not posting last week. But I have an excuse, its the end of the semester and I have tons of assignment due that I just can't find the motivation to be interested in. So its been a hassle to get my brain to do anything lately. Good news is that there's only two weeks left till the end, very excited. But despite my brain's lack of motivation to work, there has been something that I think I should've written in the first place.
A lot of people want to think about these things on a more constant basis, but just don't know how. Or some people think that they do think about deep things but they don't realize that they've tried to schedule it in, like church. And that's not where you get the good deep thoughts, when you try to schedule in deep thinking, it doesn't happen. It's like forcing yourself to be creative, you end up producing a pile of crap. So how do you get to the point where you're randomly having philosophical revelations throughout the day? Well I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I can tell you what I've gathered so far from my own experiences.
So for the better part of my life so far, which was about 13 or 14 years, I was what most people would label as a loser or an outcast. Someone who lived on the outside of most situations and social settings. I was very quiet and spent a lot of time with my own thoughts, mostly because I had no one to share them with. But all of that was my own doing, I was who I was because I was afraid to insert myself into the situations and social settings that I wanted to be in. But I'm ok with who I was because it made me who I am. And that is someone who is on their way to understanding life and all things included. Now I don't assume that my way of becoming a successful thinker is the right way and only way, but if you can take one base truth from my experience, take this.
SHUT UP!!!!
Be quiet sometimes, slow down. You want to have deep thoughts? Stop thinking so much. You need to find a way to quiet your mind. This means droppin out of everyday life for a little bit. Find a place to sit down and then just don't think, put aside your emotions and your opinions about everything. If you can't find a place that's quiet or silence just kills you, then get some headphones and put on some music and just tune out. Close your eyes if it helps and you won't fall asleep, or maybe read a book. Whatever it takes to just slow your heart rate, not feel obligated to do anything, and just slow down the thought processes. Then start thinking objectively about everything, but start with yourself. That's the hardest thing to do if you've never truly done it before. And what does it mean to think objectively? The best definition of the word objective I've found is: Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices. So to think objectively put aside your emotions and personal prejudices whatever they may be, and do this especially with yourself. And once you get that out of the way, everything becomes much simpler to get through. Basically, you need to retrain your mind to think slower about the things that matter. Everyone is so used to either doing things on auto-pilot or just speeding through the day that they just do the same thing with the things that matter.
Introduce some reductionism into your thought process, boil everything down to its most basic form. I'm talking about finding your foundation. When you start thinking about yourself objectively one of the questions that you should think about is, "How do I make decisions?" Think about how you think. It's important to find the foundation on which you make your decisions. Because most of us have unconsciously chosen what our foundation is, and more often than not those are the most wrong and most dangerous. Because then we end up making and defending decisions that we don't have a reason for making. So its like I talked about in my last post, find out, what is most important? Slow down, shut up, sit down and figure it out.
I'll try to get another post up tomorrow but no promises.
So for those of you that care, sorry about not posting last week. But I have an excuse, its the end of the semester and I have tons of assignment due that I just can't find the motivation to be interested in. So its been a hassle to get my brain to do anything lately. Good news is that there's only two weeks left till the end, very excited. But despite my brain's lack of motivation to work, there has been something that I think I should've written in the first place.
A lot of people want to think about these things on a more constant basis, but just don't know how. Or some people think that they do think about deep things but they don't realize that they've tried to schedule it in, like church. And that's not where you get the good deep thoughts, when you try to schedule in deep thinking, it doesn't happen. It's like forcing yourself to be creative, you end up producing a pile of crap. So how do you get to the point where you're randomly having philosophical revelations throughout the day? Well I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I can tell you what I've gathered so far from my own experiences.
So for the better part of my life so far, which was about 13 or 14 years, I was what most people would label as a loser or an outcast. Someone who lived on the outside of most situations and social settings. I was very quiet and spent a lot of time with my own thoughts, mostly because I had no one to share them with. But all of that was my own doing, I was who I was because I was afraid to insert myself into the situations and social settings that I wanted to be in. But I'm ok with who I was because it made me who I am. And that is someone who is on their way to understanding life and all things included. Now I don't assume that my way of becoming a successful thinker is the right way and only way, but if you can take one base truth from my experience, take this.
SHUT UP!!!!
Be quiet sometimes, slow down. You want to have deep thoughts? Stop thinking so much. You need to find a way to quiet your mind. This means droppin out of everyday life for a little bit. Find a place to sit down and then just don't think, put aside your emotions and your opinions about everything. If you can't find a place that's quiet or silence just kills you, then get some headphones and put on some music and just tune out. Close your eyes if it helps and you won't fall asleep, or maybe read a book. Whatever it takes to just slow your heart rate, not feel obligated to do anything, and just slow down the thought processes. Then start thinking objectively about everything, but start with yourself. That's the hardest thing to do if you've never truly done it before. And what does it mean to think objectively? The best definition of the word objective I've found is: Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices. So to think objectively put aside your emotions and personal prejudices whatever they may be, and do this especially with yourself. And once you get that out of the way, everything becomes much simpler to get through. Basically, you need to retrain your mind to think slower about the things that matter. Everyone is so used to either doing things on auto-pilot or just speeding through the day that they just do the same thing with the things that matter.
Introduce some reductionism into your thought process, boil everything down to its most basic form. I'm talking about finding your foundation. When you start thinking about yourself objectively one of the questions that you should think about is, "How do I make decisions?" Think about how you think. It's important to find the foundation on which you make your decisions. Because most of us have unconsciously chosen what our foundation is, and more often than not those are the most wrong and most dangerous. Because then we end up making and defending decisions that we don't have a reason for making. So its like I talked about in my last post, find out, what is most important? Slow down, shut up, sit down and figure it out.
I'll try to get another post up tomorrow but no promises.
Friday, April 9, 2010
The Importance of What is Important
Alright so yesterday I didn't post anything, Why? For a few reasons: 1. I've had a whole ton of homework that just never seems to let up. 2. Because I have so much homework and at the same time am trying to get my hours in for the PE class I signed up for, I haven't gotten much sleep in the past couple of weeks. And finally but most importantly 3. I've been procrastinating. Yeah I know, lame. I'm workin on it but I find it hard to to care about things that I just don't care about. This in reference to the homework that I'm obligated to finish at the last minute. But I'm posting now. And you owe all your thanks to the lovely Aurielle Coyle who pushed me to stop procrastinating and start writing already.
Anyway, something occurred to me this last week while my dad was scaring the crap out of me with his driving. I was thinking: To be a good driver all it takes is making the right decisions. Of course the fact that my dad seems to be getting more senile as the days go on says a lot about the kinds of decisions he makes on the road.
Last week I talked about focus, and I hope all of you have been more focused than I have in the past week. In my social psychology class we were talking about taking surveys and to illustrate this my teacher, of all questions that she could of asked, she asked, "What is the purpose of life?" I was like, kind of a deep question for a bunch of college students. Unsurprisingly most of the answers dealt with personal gratification. Which in my opinion is a very selfish way to live. But it did make me think, although I already knew the ultimate answer to the question. I took a retrospective look at the question. In regards to what I had been thinking about earlier this week, driving is all about making the right decisions. And I took it a step further, that's what life is about. Cuz what is your own life other than a series of calculated or uncalculated decisions? So to succeed in what you're doing, in life all you have to do is make the right decisions. Easier said than done. But all the same, when you think about it in depth, how hard is it really? And you really have to think about, what is the right decision? There is always a kind of general answer to the question that would take care of all decisions in your life thus avoiding thinking about your decisions on a case by case basis. But how do you do that? How can you stop at each small decision you make and evaluate the long term effect of that decision? You can't do it without looking like a paranoid. And if you spend all your time evaluating your decisions then you'll never take any actions. That's no way to live. It seems we are in a bit of a sticky situation.
Last week I was talking about focus changing on a constant basis. And I want to now separate and define that there are two types of focus, if you haven't already figured this out. There is the specific type of focus that we've already touched on. And then there is the more general focus. This is the over all objective of the mission, this is the ultimate goal and guiding concept of your life. If you think that you don't have one then you are a fool. Because everyone has one, without thinking about it you have chosen what is most important to you, whether it be aspiring to an ideal or like the college student in my class, gaining some material for yourself so you can feel good, everyone has consciously or subconsciously determined the purpose of their own life. Most of us have dangerously opted for the subconscious determination. Why? Because a lot of us just don't care or we just can't find time to care. Because to care about something so big would require us to take so much of our brain power and also require us to think objectively about ourselves. And no one wants to do that. One of the scariest but most rewarding ventures that anyone could ever take up is to be completely truthful with yourself about yourself. If everyone took a very truthful look at themselves and the ugly, illogical, unreasonable, selfish, self-serving, and ultimately stupid decisions we make and then get past them to become better, then I truly believe that everyone would find their real purpose and ultimate goal much faster.
I can not assume to tell you how to live your life and what the right decision to make is, mostly because I do not represent the kind of person who has made any of the right decisions in his own life. But I can tell you how to find the right purpose for your life. Questions. It's as simple as that, keep questioning things. I said it before the greatest question anyone can ask is "Why?" To take a more common ill-conceived purpose, to be successful. What is success? Most people here in America will tell you something resembling the American Dream. Get married, have kids, own your own house, have a good job, raise good children, and retire well. None of that is wrong. But is that a good purpose to have? Because as good as all of that stuff is, things can go horribly wrong in all of those situations and then when they do the person who makes all this important falls apart. If you focus on just getting married and you think, if you just get married then you'll be happy, then your not really focusing so much on the person that you're marrying your focusing on the fact that you are a happy because you are in a relationship. What happens when that person no longer makes you happy? What happens when that person starts treating you wrong? You've made marriage and relationships in general more important than they were ever meant to be. Maybe a better example is your house. It costs a lot more money than anyone has right now. And throughout your ownership of it you'll do what you can to improve how it looks and how you live in it. And that costs money as well. And depending on where you live there may be weather conditions that cause damage, so you have to repair it. depending on how long you live in the same place you'll have to constantly replace parts and maybe even rebuild walls and such. All of this costing money, and time, of which you have little. So by the end of your life you will have lived in your dream house. Long after you are gone, someone or something will have undone all of the hard work you put into it. Ultimately if living in a good house is most important to you, then there will be no evidence that you ever existed when you die.
What is most important? Because all material is subject to decay. Nothing in the world, and I mean literally nothing, lasts forever. Not even love, as depressing as that is. Do not think that forever ends when you die. Friends and family, as valuable as their lives are, they will not last forever, friends leave and family members die, sometimes sooner than you think. What is important? Test it, if you think you have it figured out already, chances are that you don't. Test everything that you think holds eternal importance. And when you figure it out, when you finally come to the realization, test it again, and then live every waking moment of your life striving to make decisions and short term goals that get you closer to that which is of ultimate importance. Never stop asking questions.
Anyway, something occurred to me this last week while my dad was scaring the crap out of me with his driving. I was thinking: To be a good driver all it takes is making the right decisions. Of course the fact that my dad seems to be getting more senile as the days go on says a lot about the kinds of decisions he makes on the road.
Last week I talked about focus, and I hope all of you have been more focused than I have in the past week. In my social psychology class we were talking about taking surveys and to illustrate this my teacher, of all questions that she could of asked, she asked, "What is the purpose of life?" I was like, kind of a deep question for a bunch of college students. Unsurprisingly most of the answers dealt with personal gratification. Which in my opinion is a very selfish way to live. But it did make me think, although I already knew the ultimate answer to the question. I took a retrospective look at the question. In regards to what I had been thinking about earlier this week, driving is all about making the right decisions. And I took it a step further, that's what life is about. Cuz what is your own life other than a series of calculated or uncalculated decisions? So to succeed in what you're doing, in life all you have to do is make the right decisions. Easier said than done. But all the same, when you think about it in depth, how hard is it really? And you really have to think about, what is the right decision? There is always a kind of general answer to the question that would take care of all decisions in your life thus avoiding thinking about your decisions on a case by case basis. But how do you do that? How can you stop at each small decision you make and evaluate the long term effect of that decision? You can't do it without looking like a paranoid. And if you spend all your time evaluating your decisions then you'll never take any actions. That's no way to live. It seems we are in a bit of a sticky situation.
Last week I was talking about focus changing on a constant basis. And I want to now separate and define that there are two types of focus, if you haven't already figured this out. There is the specific type of focus that we've already touched on. And then there is the more general focus. This is the over all objective of the mission, this is the ultimate goal and guiding concept of your life. If you think that you don't have one then you are a fool. Because everyone has one, without thinking about it you have chosen what is most important to you, whether it be aspiring to an ideal or like the college student in my class, gaining some material for yourself so you can feel good, everyone has consciously or subconsciously determined the purpose of their own life. Most of us have dangerously opted for the subconscious determination. Why? Because a lot of us just don't care or we just can't find time to care. Because to care about something so big would require us to take so much of our brain power and also require us to think objectively about ourselves. And no one wants to do that. One of the scariest but most rewarding ventures that anyone could ever take up is to be completely truthful with yourself about yourself. If everyone took a very truthful look at themselves and the ugly, illogical, unreasonable, selfish, self-serving, and ultimately stupid decisions we make and then get past them to become better, then I truly believe that everyone would find their real purpose and ultimate goal much faster.
I can not assume to tell you how to live your life and what the right decision to make is, mostly because I do not represent the kind of person who has made any of the right decisions in his own life. But I can tell you how to find the right purpose for your life. Questions. It's as simple as that, keep questioning things. I said it before the greatest question anyone can ask is "Why?" To take a more common ill-conceived purpose, to be successful. What is success? Most people here in America will tell you something resembling the American Dream. Get married, have kids, own your own house, have a good job, raise good children, and retire well. None of that is wrong. But is that a good purpose to have? Because as good as all of that stuff is, things can go horribly wrong in all of those situations and then when they do the person who makes all this important falls apart. If you focus on just getting married and you think, if you just get married then you'll be happy, then your not really focusing so much on the person that you're marrying your focusing on the fact that you are a happy because you are in a relationship. What happens when that person no longer makes you happy? What happens when that person starts treating you wrong? You've made marriage and relationships in general more important than they were ever meant to be. Maybe a better example is your house. It costs a lot more money than anyone has right now. And throughout your ownership of it you'll do what you can to improve how it looks and how you live in it. And that costs money as well. And depending on where you live there may be weather conditions that cause damage, so you have to repair it. depending on how long you live in the same place you'll have to constantly replace parts and maybe even rebuild walls and such. All of this costing money, and time, of which you have little. So by the end of your life you will have lived in your dream house. Long after you are gone, someone or something will have undone all of the hard work you put into it. Ultimately if living in a good house is most important to you, then there will be no evidence that you ever existed when you die.
What is most important? Because all material is subject to decay. Nothing in the world, and I mean literally nothing, lasts forever. Not even love, as depressing as that is. Do not think that forever ends when you die. Friends and family, as valuable as their lives are, they will not last forever, friends leave and family members die, sometimes sooner than you think. What is important? Test it, if you think you have it figured out already, chances are that you don't. Test everything that you think holds eternal importance. And when you figure it out, when you finally come to the realization, test it again, and then live every waking moment of your life striving to make decisions and short term goals that get you closer to that which is of ultimate importance. Never stop asking questions.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Here We Are At The Beginning
Hey all, I'm not really sure what to put here in my first entry. But I figured I'd start it now, because if I don't start it now I never will. It will become one of those things that you put off till tomorrow, but we all know tomorrow never comes. So here's to not procrastinating.
Why? One of the best questions a person could ever ask. Although it does get annoying coming from a 4 year old. But it's a good place to start when you don't know where to start. So why do I have a blog? Well I've always known that I think way to much. I'm sure you have someone you know who over thinks everything and probably takes things to far that normally people would just leave alone. Yeah that was me, taking things to far, didn't know when the joke was dead, stuff like that. Fortunately I'm less of a weirdo now and a little more socially acceptable, although those of my friends that know me well enough would probably comment that I'm still a big weirdo and that they just want me to think that I'm more acceptable. It's cool you're all weird for being my friends then. :)
But enough of my ADD, I do think things through more than most people I know. I believe that there is a deeper meaning to everything, whether that deeper meaning is relevant to our own lives is the deciding factor. Think what you may about the world and those that live in it, but i refuse to believe that we are all here just to be here. I've seen and experienced to many things to think so simply. I've always known that I was a little more insightful than most people but I've also always been a little to shy to share this with people that didn't ask for it from me.
I recently opened up about an experience I had earlier in my life that changed my way of thinking about everything forever. Thanks to my dear Aurielle, I realized that maybe some of my thoughts might actually inspire other people to take a deeper look at themselves and their own lives. Because honestly, I haven't met a lot of people that are able to think about themselves objectively, much less the world around them. We're all too immersed in our own worlds to think about others. It may not be so much that we're selfish as much as it is that maybe we've had our nose to the grind stone for so long that we forgot that there was a world outside of the one we know. And it doesn't have to be work, it can be whatever. It's about our priorities, some things are just more important at the moment, but then we can forget that priorities fluctuate what's important changes from moment to moment. For instance, when you're driving you're focusing on everything around you, checking mirrors constantly as any good driver would do. Messing with the radio and all that and then you're on the highway and there's a car crash. Suddenly all of your attention is on what's in front of you, so you slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the wreckage. At least that's what most people would do. A more aware driver would look for ways around the wreck rather than relying only on the brakes to save them.
The point is that our focuses in life should change, it's not necessarily bad or good one way or the other what our focus is at the time. When you're at work you should be focused on work, when you're with your family you should be focused on your family. Many of us today fail to switch modes and actually think rather than just acting.
This is what most of my posts will be about. Taking a closer look at life and the decisions that we make in it. You can accept what I say or not, that's fine. If you have another view point, I'm eager to hear it. All that I ask is that there be no arguing, if you come here looking to prove someone wrong or prove that you are right then you are not welcome. This is simply a place for me and anyone else to share thoughts. Pick what I say apart, all of what i say may not apply to you, but hopefully you can take some shred of truth from what I say.
I don't know when I'll be back on, I'm going to try to make this a regular thing, but I'm in college and I'm a little overwhelmed sometimes. So I think I'll try to get on and post something every Thursday or Friday, maybe more frequently if I feel that what I have to say can't wait.
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