Something I heard in the beginning of my journey is to keep the focus on myself, which is great advice. Yet, somehow, we can often be distracted.
I was told, “worry about you.”
I was told to stop comparing and stop thinking about what other people say or what other people do.
“Keep the focus on yourself!”

I was told to focus on my own goals and to worry about my own momentum. But at the time, I was early into a certain change. I was growing and certainly uncomfortable.
I had to endure the strains of a new life and the discomfort of learning new things. Also, I was made to endure a new life that made no sense to me.

The question above is why start here?
Since, I am open to suggestions, I respond to this question with a question of my own.
Where else should we start?
Where else do we begin, but in the beginning?
Right? So –
Here at Phase One, our attempts to understand ourselves and our freakouts and breakdowns are simple. We are here to explore the obvious.
We are here to either understand more about ourselves or more about other people around us. Maybe your desire to follow along with this is to improve your insight. Or, like the critics, maybe you disagree. Either way, since you’re here, we might as well go on.
Okay?

I think today is perfect for this entry. I think that this is not only timely but necessary for me. Also, the topic of forgiveness is an interesting one, to say the least.
I say this because of all that we carry on our shoulders. I say this because of the burdens in our heart and because of the weights of our soul that weigh us down and keep us from flying free.

Safe to say that I have held on to more than I should have.
Safe to say that I have my bouts that I have lost to. I have beaten myself internally and for what?
I have dissected and diagnosed.
However, in my search for sanity or personal improvement, I remained at an impasse. I kept myself stuck in the muck of unchangeable things because no matter how I tried to improve, I held myself back because I never knew how to let myself go.

In all honesty, math was never my strong point. I can do the simple things. I know the basics pretty well but for the most part, I am grateful for calculators and things that do the math for me.
But, regardless of the items which can either add, subtract, multiply or divide; this does not remove me from the responsibility of understanding how to do the math.
I say this from a different angle because to each person comes an individual and unique set of personal mathematics.

By now, there is an obvious match between our thinking and our feelings. At this point, we understand that our thinking is interconnected with the end result which are our emotions. By now, it is clear that our thinking is based on a pathway of patterns and behaviors, concepts and experiences. This is where biases can lead us to inaccurate assumptions. This is also where past thinking overlaps and reaches over to impose on future beliefs and possibilities.

Safe to say that our mind has a way of reeling back to a time when we heard something, only it seems we never listened until later in life.
It seems that we might have heard something, but we never listened until we replayed the lesson back in our mind.
Or, maybe like in our last post; maybe this comes when we reach a turning point or when we’re ready to reach the starting point.

However, in our attempts to redefine ourselves and in the rebirth of sanity and to the moment at hand, when we choose to live our lives in an order that we deserve, we come to a level of awareness that gives way to a level of open-mindedness.
This is when we start to experience our moments of clarity.

Whether we are at the starting point or at a turning point in our lives is yet to be determined. Either way, my reasons for this journal are unique to me. This means your reasons for following along are unique to you.
My reasons for this journal are to highlight my goals. In fact, my reason for this journal is no different from any other journal before this one. Each day, I come here to create a place for myself.
I come here to sit before my computer screen to create a vision.
I do this so that I can give myself something to look forward to. But also, I come here to keep from my demons and, essentially, I create an alternative action to quiet the unfriendly thinking that goes on in my head. But more, this is something that allows me to kickstart my daily goals on an incremental basis.

So, I hear you want to be happy, is that right?
Well, then let’s see what has to happen.

There has to come a time when something wakes us up. Maybe this can come from something we’ve seen or known about for a long time and then almost out of nowhere, we shake our heads as if to say, “Wait, what??”
Something comes along and brings us to a new understanding. Or, the lights come on and we’re not in the dark anymore.
Or maybe we’ve come to a new level of awareness. Or either we’re tired of what we see or what we have and, to put this plainly, maybe we just want more. Is that so bad?
In short, the answer is no!

What has to happen?
In the sense of our life, what has to happen to make or create actions?
This is a great question.

When talking about our sanity and our best life, what has to happen for us to make this so?
When talking about happiness, what has to happen to make us happy?
Or wait, do we even know (or believe) if happiness is real?

It is true that our past has led us up to where we are now. It is also true that our past has been defined as what we knew. Our history has certainly played a role in shaping the way we think and the way we see things.
This can certainly set up our values and has made its contributions to our judgments and biases.
We’ve all come to our own conclusions about the future before. We’ve also prepared for the unknown by reaching back to what we knew.

It is safe to say that with most people, we’ve all gone through bouts of pain and sadness. We’ve all experienced loss. By now, we’ve all had our feelings hurt and we’ve all been disappointed, more than once. Even so, or even while in the moments of glimmering hope, everyone has experienced a letdown or a betrayal of either fate or a transaction in their life.

When we talk about the rebirth of sanity, we have to establish what this means to us.
What is sanity and, therefore, what is the absence of sanity?
What does it mean to have a strong understanding or beneficial presence of mind?
What would it look like to have a strong and beneficial presence of self?