Our comfort zone is the death of us!

“…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference”.

Can you stay in one place but physically travel to your intended destination?  Can you think about what you will have for dinner to-night, while at the same time do mathematic calculations?

No! This is not how the brain works. This is not how things work inside of us.

Yet this is the kind of exercise we engage in when we sit in that artificial space called the comfort zone. We constantly sit there even while we pine away about wanting to improve our personal situation or station in life .

We constantly lie to ourselves about wanting or needing to change something… anything…. about ourselves and the things that negatively impacts our lives. Yet we are either to scared or too confused when it comes to leaving our comfort zone.

The hungry man sits in on the sofa desiring a drink from the fridge. He sits and thirst for the drink. He is fantasizing. He is engaged in the kind of activity most of us in today’s “modern” society does.

Only a scant few would get up off that sofa, go to the fridge and select from a variety  of liquids with which to quench our thirst. The second man has left the comfort  of the sofa and in doing so, has not being physically harmed in the process.

Our individual comfort zone is a place or situation where we feel “safe”or at ease and “without stress”. It’s a place we go to or a place we choose to remain in, when difficult choices  have to be made. When difficult challenges have to be met.

One cannot open one’s hands to receive new gifts when they keep a tight grip on old gifts. One cannot consistently stuff new and more clothes in an older or smaller bag. One would have to get a newer AND bigger bag to accommodate the increased load.

One has to release the old in order to receive the new. You cannot drive a new car with the attitude of the driver of an old junk, nor can you purchase and live in a 5 bedroom mansion, and move in with the mindset of someone used to living under a bridge.

Our comfort zone is the death of us. Many of us have died in our comfort zone. Died at 17-20-22-29-45. We have died long before the death is registered in physically. We have died in spirit. We have died emotionally and in many cases mentally.

The man who sees the world at 50 the same as he did at 20, has wasted 30 years of his life —Muhammad Ali

What an impact full statement. What a powerful indictment of many of us who choose to live in and die in our comfort zone.

Life has multiple plateaus. As children we scale these plateaus fearlessly and with the kind of ignorant resolve’s that only a child who sees the world has a place of glorious wonder could.

Unfortunately adulthood got in the way of our exploration of the world. We become infected by the disease of adulthood. A disease that kills our wonder and reduce our fearlessness of exploration to nothing but fear.

The only two kind’s of fear that are naturally built into us are the fear of loud noise and the fear of falling. Every other fear is manufactured by that backstabbing conniving thing called the mind. The mind conspires with our emotions to make us fear the world.

For most of us this fear paralyzes us. Some of us deal with that fear by going forth and attack the world negatively. Destroying the planet  to show ourselves that we DON’T  fear it. Most of us chose to give into our fear’s by residing in our comfort zone. Mentally and emotionally curled up in a ball while ducking our thumbs.  The blanket covers our ears a’s we scream “mommy make the noise stop”!

Only a scant few of us Wil choose to step boldly into the void.  Step bravely of the cliff of uncertainty  and face the world with the love and joy of exploration in our hearts. It is this bold move that allows us to find growth in ourselves. To grow into the promise of who we are supposed to be.

Life is of but two choices. You can choose to give up.  Or you can dare to go forward. We choose to give up because we fear to lose. We also give up because we fear to win. Each fear state carries its own reasons and justification.  Neither of which tells the true story. The story is we are greater than the reasons we give for not to be great.

Our lives ends on that day we choose to stop living our purpose. Our dreams. We can have dreams. We can have desires, wants and needs.  They will remain so until we make an effort; a concentrated effort to fulfill those dreams, wants and needs.

Do you know what two of the greatest impetus for getting out of your comfort zone is?

There is hunger!

When your hunger to achieve becomes greater than the need to breathe or remain comfortable.

Then there is Pain!

The emotion of pain, derived from specific experiences that drives you to prove you are not that which originally caused your pain.

Either one can drive you to a place you need to be in order to get what you need to get. But you have to first chose to be uncomfortable. It is not called the comfort zone because it is uncomfortable.  So in order to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, you have to leave your comfort zone.

Being uncomfortable triggers ancient survival instinct encoded in your DNA. Yes I know, the big-headed needs in the science lab says the brain choose comfort over danger as a survival mechanism. That is partly true. There is another part  of the survival mechanisms in the brain, that modern society has killed. Or at least imprisoned.

That part is for want of a better word…hunger.  An insatiable hunger to know. To explore. To meet and overcome challenges.  That was what we had as children. That is what we need to release from the prison inside of us.

We chose though, to live in our comfort zone, hoping we can eat omelette. Not realizing you have to crack a few eggs in the process. Not realizing that we cannot learn to swim standing on the shore. Or realizing what we must do, but are conditioned to not do what we need to do, to get what we really want or desire.

How does your comfort zone looks like to you today? Are you comfortable there? Are you really, really comfortable there?

This requires deep thinking.

In the pursuit of happiness; pt 2

Heavy is the crown you wear

Another happy home for sale,
one more love has failed
Two more fools have tried
But they got s much pride inside
That they don’t believe in giving in
Though they both know
they both can’t win
Ones right one must be wrong
But forgiving makes a love grow stronger
When the piece of your love
are scattered far and wide

(Chorus)
Bend down, bend down,
take them from the ground now
Just forget your foolish pride
Let peace and love abide
Bend down, bend down,
take them from the ground

Don’t fuss and fight no more
Love can open any door
Love will find away
To bring you happy,
happy days now
Forget our sorrow now
Live for tomorrow now
Don’t let your children pay
For anything you say now

(Chorus)
When the pieces of your love
Are scattered far and wide
Bend down, bend down, bend down
Take them from the ground now
Just forget your foolish pride
Let peace and love abide
Bend down, bend down

The quote, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”, comes from the play King Henry the Fourth, Part Two, by William Shakespeare. It is a person who has great responsibilities, such as a king, is constantly worried and therefore doesn’t sleep soundly.

Over the last few days, I have seen more than a few postings and memes about black love. Celebrating black love. Showing positive images of young vibrant looking couples as the face of black love. Positive indeed!

Growing up as a child, I often hear that a man’s home is his castle and he is the king of his castle.  Evolving from a teen into an adult, I have heard that while the man is the head, the woman is the neck that moves the head. Growing into and still evolving into the overstanding of myself as a man, I am aware that the symbiotic, interpersonal relationship between a man and a woman, works best when they each are aware of their complimentary characteristics and their willingness to implement these characteristics to benefit the relationship.

Different from social the media likes, that many today pursue, the desire to be liked “within” a mature and authentic relationship, lies in its reciprocity.  Reciprocity is the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, especially privileges granted between compliments in a complimentary relationship.  Part of this reciprocity, as I stated in previous article of the same subject, finds strength in allowing each other the room and freedom to physically and emotionally express themselves.

Freedom and love go together. Overstand that love is not a reaction. Love is not something that relies on how we feel that day. If I decide to workout only on the days I “feel good”, there would never be any progress or success. If I decide to only smile when something MAKES me smile, i wouldn’t smile at all. Especially if you drive in my City”s downtown core. If I love you because YOU love me, we are just trading superficiality. Modern aspect of this dirty four letter word we claim is love, is really concerned with or comprehending only what is apparent or obvious. It is a shallow apparency rather than the experiencing of actual or substantial feelings.

The freedom inherent in authentic love begins inside of the self. In finding the freedom inherent in love and in expressing the freedom of love, one must first correct the chaos in the mind, in order for ones love life and life in general, to fall in balance. Authentic love is not about asking for things in return. Authentic love is not about me feeling that I am giving you something.  Authentic love is giving love, because, you want to without any expectations. And while you are not expecting something in return, embracing a reciprocal return is the essence of loving and being loved.

A man told motivational speaker, Eric Thomas he admired how he loved and poured love onto his wife. He asked E.T what kind of things he did to cement her apprecilove of him. He wanted to do some of the superficial things E.T does for his own wife. E.T, a very in demand speaker, told him he cooked, for his wife. He does her laundry and ensure she is relaxed and “taken” care of.  Later E.T approached the man and asked how the little “experiment” was going. The man said it wasn’t going well. He stated that doing his womans laundry or cooking for her was seen as him being a punk.

E.T told him that the failure did not lie in the effort. The failure lie in the incongruency between his value system and his action. For a man to say cooking for his woman or laundering her clothes, is being “soft”, is where modern love remains superficial, instead of authentic. The black man often times feel that just going out to work and bringing in the money, giving her money to get her nail and hair done, among other things, proves his love to her. He sincerely believes that, because many of us are children and grandchildren of people a couple of generation removed from the plantation. Due to this generational trauma, our inability to effectively complement our “mirror self”, is more a figure it out as you go along, than that of a systemic conditioning handed down by the elders.

Women today are all about what the man can do for her. Her expectations of him are higher than her own expected efforts. Women today can’t even cook and see cooking as slaving over a stove. Many woman have a good man at home, he may be “boring” because he isn’t about hype and excitability. But his efforts render him a “keeper”. Such a man is a man a woman should “spoil”, through being his comfort after a hard day dealing with white pathology. Cook for him, cuddle him and taking care of his other “physical” needs. Doing such a thing as being each other’s comfort, serving each other without being asked to,  ensures that the love has growth or potentiality of growth instead of stagnation. Stagnation is death and too many of us allow our relationship to die a miserable death.

We walk away from love as brother sang above, because we enter into situationship expecting to be hurt. This is the mentality of modern couples. Thus they find anything to justify walking away, “before love walks away from them”.

Relationships are not subject and should not be subjected to social media likes or superficiality of trendiness and the mentality of taking as much out of it as you can. Relationship requires work…another dirty four letter word. It requires a humility of mind, where we are not competing with each other. Relationship is a process that is long and difficult, due to our varied values. The lack of trust in the process is based on ignorance of it and a failure to apply the self to growing and learning what makes our compliment genuinely happy.

If we are to pursue happiness in love, we must first find that happiness in ourselves. This happiness requires us to do onto others as we would want them to do onto us. A deep overstanding of this idea, gives us a deeper overstanding of the freedom necessary for loving. As long as we pursue social likes in order to feel validated, we will suffer greatly. If we keep doing the same thing we keep doing, we will keep getting the same thing we keep getting. And while we keep getting the same thing, we EXPECT to get a different result. This is insanity and this is why we always get what we search for.

I am trying to get to that space where it is automatic. I pray that you do the same. Bless!

 

In the pursuit of happiness; pt 1

Doing it for likes and shit like that

An ancient Chinese curse states; “May you live in interesting times”. On the surface this statement seems as neutral as neutral can be. How you interpret it is based on what you call interesting. Which is precisely the gist of the “curse”.

Similar to that curse is an even bigger one. May you find what you’re looking for.  A lot of what we do in these interesting times end up netting the kinds of rewards we receive for the things we look for.  According to Sigmund “Fraud”, people’s sense of self can be distilled down to two elemental yearnings. The strong desire for sex and the strong desire to be famous.

These two yearnings can themselves be summed up as one single burning desire in us. The desire to be liked. We seek sex not like the animals, purely for procreation. We seek sex as a validation of us to ourselves and to whom ever we have sex  with.

interpersonally, validation lies in the recognition or affirmation that a person or their feelings or opinions are valid or worthwhile. Therefore in these interesting times, the desire to be liked is confirmed through sexual gratification and fame.

One need not be elevated to the typical scale of a celebrity to seek and acquire fame. One can find fame or validation of the self, among one’s immediate peers. As long as you feel validated by the responses of those in your immediate or even cursory circle, one’s desire appears to be sated. The interesting times we live in have numerous defining examples of both our search and the discovery of what we seek. There is a statement i heard for the first time after becoming involved in the social media world.

Its called “doing it for the Gram”. Doing it for the gram is the truncated expression of automatons in an age of emoji and limited conversation and interpersonal relationship. Doing it for the gram and getting likes on social media; whether instagram, Facebook or any of the other social media platforms, combine to validate those two Chinese curses.

Back in the day while i was first introduced to the phenomena of myspace and trying to figure out how it works and the purpose of it, considering most of what i have read appeared to be a whole ton of kneegrow shenanigans, Facebook was gaining rapid traction.

I remember sitting in an office of my old job at the homeless shelter, back around 2006, when my co-worker on that shift, kept commenting about different people requesting to be her”friend”. At one point she commented that her young son, twelve at the time was requesting to be her Facebook “friend”.

I knew he was twelve because i asked her how old he was. Right after she commented that she didn’t know he had a Facebook page. In 2006 my daughter was 15 and was not on social media. At that time my daughter was being homeschooled and my ex and I were involving her in a multiplicity of programs to keep her busy and connected to the real world.

Around 2009 I got on Facebook for two reasons. originally to promote my non-profit organization, in partnership with my now deceased friend Leroy Simpson ( rest in power afrikan) and our pilot training program geared towards preparing Afrikan youth in Toronto for the aviation field. I mentioned that my brother, a veteran trainer of commercial pilots, died under mysterious circumstances, flying a simple two-seater, i could have learned to fy after a short lesson. This happened during his contentious battle with crooked lawyers and other characters trying to steal prime land he owned and was developing for our program.

The other reason why I got on stupid book, was to ensure that more people become aware of this blog, so that when i am promoting future business i would have a sizable base. I think i got on Instagram about two years ago, mainly out of curiosity because my lady at the time was big on it.

Now after saying all of this, I circle back to the ideology of these interesting times where “doing it for the Gram” or Facebook “likes”, became a serious validation of self in a time when people with character flaws and self-esteem issues, flood these two platforms. I mention these two social media outlets because they are the only two I am involved with. In the early stages of my Facebook journey, i would read about kneegrows being offended by some comment and threaten another. Some of these kneegrows had even taken the beef off-line, confronting and even harming another person.

All of the beefing, treat making, bathroom and gym selfies, risqué’ behaviors and images uploaded on Facebook and Instagram are mainly to elicit attention, adoration, fame and”likes”. From these attention seeking pursuit, many kneegrows get sex…real sex, due to developing superficial relationships online, only to have it break off, so the can end up complaining about each other. Before jumping right back into this shallow, shark infested water for more of the same.

Many kneegrows also achieve a form of notoriety as social media celebrity. I remember commenting to my lady at the time, how random people be requesting to be my friend out of the blue. Many of these request are coming from people who maybe friends through proxy or who may have read a comment i made and feel they know me or would like to know me.

I have had females crush on me and then hate on me because i did not give them the expected response the sought. One even chastised me for shouting out a sister merely by saying…” that’s my girl”…as if i am her possession and shouldn’t interact with my female “friends”. I have had kneegrows threaten me for voicing opinions on things they claim they would defend with violence

Black women are the most affected by this pursuit of this superficial happiness because black women seem to do the most begging for likes and in the most pathetic of ways. Scores of images of black women taking face, ass and titty shots in their cars, public washroom or their own bathroom with the used tampons on the floor, as well as other “interesting” ones, seem to be the norm instead of the exception.

With the influx of emasculated and effeminate males, competing with these women for “best internet selfies”, what we are seeing are a lot of people finding what they have searched for in these interesting times.

Validation from people and things outside of themselves. Which is why happiness can never be attained. It is quite interesting indeed, how “situationships” are being built and are failing daily, for social media views and likes. While real or potential relationships suffer and die because of the inability to RELATE to each other offline.