Memories From the Balcony – One Day

The following is a personal service announcement. I know the usual catch phrase would be that this is a public service announcement. But this isn’t really public. No, this is certainly personal.
This is a moment of awakening and more, this is a pledge between us.
Just us. Just you and I.
No one else.

But for now . . .
The sun is up. The trees have been emptied for a while now. It is February here on Project Earth and our side of the hemisphere is still tilted away from the sun. Today is another day.
Once more, today is a day that the world revolves around the sun.
Once more around the park.
Once more through the woods.

Once more around the block or through the streets in what is otherwise know as a concrete jungle or New York City.
Today is another shot at something, but at what, I have no idea.
Anything can happen.
The news can come on and say that hey, we figured this whole thing out and world peace starts tomorrow.
Well, maybe not world peace per se, but anything can happen.

I’m not sure what’s in store. I don’t know if today’s the day that we learn to make a score.
I don’t know if today’s the day we pull it off and just like that, the world turns a little warmer in our favor.
I try not to listen to the news or pay attention to the reports of war because, to be honest, there’s a war all around us. Everyone is fighting back against something. Some of us are fighting with each other – and people like us, we’re done. We’re tired of fighting. We’re tired of the back and forth and tired of the work-week bullshit.
We’re tired of the brave face and tired of the plastic smile which is something we’ve learned to wear, just to keep up the façade, just to keep up with an appearance. Meanwhile, does anyone really look anymore?
Does anyone really notice when we’re drowning in thin air?
The truth is most people are so caught-up with themselves that they couldn’t tell (or care) about anyone (or anything) else.

Each day is a mystery. What’s a mystery?
A mystery is anything that’s kept secret or is unknown or unexplained.
It’s all just another puzzle. That’s it.
Again, that’s life.
Life is an elaborate puzzle within a puzzle. Each second comes with its own piece that adds up to become part of a much bigger picture.
Hopefully, someday, a picture will appear.
Hopefully, you and I will be able to fix things together.
This way, the picture clears and we can see a little more.
We can learn a little more. We can understand and we can settle down more too because the unknown and the concerns about all the back and forth bullshit will be seen as pointless – like worry for example.

There’s a great saying that goes, “Worry is like a rocking chair. It will give you something to do but it never gets you anywhere.”
I happen to agree with this.
I say this with experience because worry and I go as far back as my earliest memory. 

Maybe this is why I like to watch the sunrise.
Maybe I like watching the sky go from dark to light.
Or, maybe I just enjoy the colors at the horizon. For me, it’s a good thing to watch when I make my special coffee blend – a little espresso and some coffee blended – just to get me ready for the day, to wake me up, and to comfort me with a flavor that I have been enjoying for longer than I can remember. 

I have redone and reshaped my life. I have restarted my journey and redefined my past.
I have readdressed the way I view myself – or, at least this is a process that I am working on.
Most of all, I wanted to revisit this thing we call “our purpose” because, after all, what are we if we don’t have a purpose?
What’s a topic without a point?
What’s a journey without a destination?
What’s life without the drive to live it?

I have been telling you about different versions of my past which are all true.
To the best of my ability, I have been forthright and modest because, at least here, I see no reason to decorate my life as something it wasn’t.
No, this is the one place I want to come and be completely and totally free to be honest.
I want to be square on all sides.
Regardless of opinions or perception, I come here to expose the details of my truth because, in all fairness, this is the only way I know that I can improve and advance to the next level of awareness.
More to the point, I just want to be better by one step each day.
That’s all.

I know that most of my life was spent meandering between jobs or groups of friends.
I know that I spent much of my time in a strange sense of quasi-limbo.
I have lived with the unsureness of who I want to be or what I want to do.
Then one day – someone called me out on this.

Someone asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks.
What do you want your life to look like in three years?
Three years?
I couldn’t figure out what my life was going to look like in three days or three weeks.
But three years?
To be honest . . .
I was sort of winging it. If you know what I mean.
I had no point.
I had no direction.
I had no passion for what I was doing nor was I happy.
I was more stuck than anything else.
I was held in a pattern of simple existence.
There were no excessive thrills and there were no tremendous letdowns.
There was just life on a “more of the same” basis. 

I woke up. I went to work. I dealt with work bullshit and people bullshit.
I was only existing.
I had a small circle of people around me. I never dared much. I never tried to reach the next level in my career. I was fine to be mediocre (at best) and fine with whatever happened – which, to be clear, is sort of like a leaf that’s heading downstream in a brook that eventually spills into a lake or if anything, the leaf might find its way to a great big river – no direction. If I get stuck, then so be it. If I made it to the mouth of the river and find that I have fled into the vastness of nothing else but the sea – then so be it. 

I can remember the question –
Where do you see yourself in three years?

I looked at this image that came to my mind.
I was living in a way that, at one point in my younger years, I would have sworn, “That’ll never be me.”
If the younger me was able to see the older me, I swear that I’d have had to kick my own ass.

There is a question and it’s a simple question too.
What do you want?

Really, this is simple.
What do you want out of this life?
Do you want to leave something behind?
How do you want your final day to be when you look back and see what you’ve done (or haven’t done) and in that minute, do you want to contemplate your life with regret – or do you want to look back and say, “That was me!”
I learned to dance the tango and I swept the floor with the bottoms of my shoes until the sunrise came to call me home.

Figuratively speaking, I have been viewing these memories from the balcony. Hence, the previous chapters as well as the ones which will follow this one.
I have been looking back at the times of my life to see how I was either too timid or too misled.
I am sure there were a thousand times when I was too afraid to dance or too afraid to let myself go, just to enjoy, just to cheer, or just to take in the scene and dig it all without any worry in my heart.  

I always say this. But it’s time to say it again, I am like you.
Maybe not specifically or exactly.
But still, I am like you.
I am like anyone else in this world with hopes and dreams.
I am like anyone who has worries.
I am exactly the same as anyone who understands that life can be unkind and that it is the very remnants of this unkindness that often trips us or keeps us stuck. It is our detailed history that keeps us in the wrong places or at the wrong jobs or in the wrong life. Unless we unlock the doors and set ourselves free – it is very easy to become a prisoner of “self.”

I once told you about the time that I pulled up to a driveway of a house where I lived.
Only nothing seemed like it belonged to me.
The life on the inside of that door was someone else’s.
Or so it seemed.
I remember looking at the bay window at the front of the house as if this was a huge, large-screen television.
I was watching this as if it were fiction and it was here that I knew.
It was here that I understood what it means to settle on one’s self.
It was here that I began to recognize the details of when we trade our hopes or dreams for second best – or we do this because our first choice at life seems too out of reach – so, we give in and take the trade because hey, something is better than nothing.
Maybe this process was only beginning for me.
Maybe the realization was a seedling about to sprout but, either way, it was here that I recognized the valuable dangers of what happens when people settle for a trade instead of living for what they want.

It’s been more than three years since I heard that question.
It’s almost double that now . . .
And where has this led me – besides, to you?

Well, I have been flown across the country a few times. I have been on the news a few times. I have had the chance to meet some of the most impactful and incredible people that this world has to offer.
I took this as a challenge.
I took this to heart and while I am not where I want to be (at least not yet), I do know that I am on my way.
I do know that I have a direction in mind and each day when I wake up and come here to sit with you, I find myself at least one footstep closer to an idea which has evolved into one hell of a dream.

And I get it.
My dream is similar to my redemption; in which case, I mean my dreams have nothing to do with anybody’s response.
I have to work at this. Daily. Constantly. I have to be both of two things: I have to go at this persistently and consistently.

I have to wake up and come here, just to sit with you.
At least just for a minute because this is my motivation. You. Me. This dream I have.
The idea of a farm.
This is my design to accomplish the hopes of building something that when I find myself at the end of my days, I can look back and say, “Yeah, that was me.”
I did that!

I have watched a lot of people wither away alive and never dare to live one day in their life.
So, in answer to the question: Where do I want to be in three years?
Alive.
This means living, not existing.

I want to be alive and well.
I want to keep working on my craft.
I want to keep building my dreams into something more than just a pillow of clouds or the hopes which happen to me when I sit here to view the sunrise.

Maybe three years from now, on this very day, we could be sitting on a boat – maybe down by the Keys or maybe somewhere off the coast of a shore where the sands are brilliant and white.
The ocean is as blue as we’ve always hoped.
The sky is clear and the sun is high and nothing, nothing at all will be able to stand in our way because at last – we finally realized that there’s a point to all of this. Nothing and I do mean nothing can or will ever hold us back again – from now until the hour of our death, Amen . . .

By the way, have you ever heard of a boat called Ocean Alexander –
It’s not a bad thing to see or use as a vision

to keep us hungry.