God Speaks Daily

The way we see our pasts effects how we see opportunities around us.

I went to college when I was 18, 19 years old because my dad paid for it, and I didn’t have to work. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I just floated along. The only consistency in my life back then was my ability to show up at the right bar on cheap drink night.

Anyway, I passed many of my classes just by showing up infrequently and doing a minimum of homework. The math classes were beyond me because I didn’t show up often enough or do the homework. I ended up thinking I was bad at math.

I also thought I was bad at writing. I took English 102 – the term paper class 4 or 5 times and failed it every time. The last time I took the same instructor again and redid the same paper using his red marks as a guide for improvement. The fucker failed me again and said I hadn’t done as much work as the other students. I told him I’d done 5 times as much work as the other students with a look of impending rage on my face and he changed my grade to a C.

Years later I decided I didn’t want to be a roofer for the rest of my life. I’d looked around me and saw there weren’t any old roofers. This motivated me to go back to school.

I took placement tests and started taking classes at night. I thought I knew somethings, but ended up in an algebra class that was about the same as the one I’d taken in the 7th grade.

At first I was surprised because I seemed to be good at math. Later I realized I was good at math, but the key was doing the homework. I did the homework for every lesson, and if I had problems with it, I did extra work until I mastered the concepts.

When I transferred to ASU, I had to take 2 semesters of accounting that wasn’t offered at the community colleges, so I took other classes I thought would help me. One of them was a class called “Writing For Professions.”

I took the writing class because I was sure I didn’t know how to write. Over the years since I’d fooled around going to college I’d avoided writing anything because I was a poor writer.

The class was 5 term papers over a semester with classroom instruction on style and grammar. I felt it would help me as I got into more advanced classes.

I remember the first draft of the first paper well. I had a virus on my computer that made the printer do weird things. It played songs with the impact head, and I couldn’t figure out how to set the pages. Luckily it used tractor-fed paper so I could cut the pages up with scissors.

When I turned the paper in, the teacher said it was a rough draft and the formatting wasn’t important! When I did the final draft, I took a disk to a copy center and had them print the paper with the correct margins and such.

I did all the papers that way. I surprised myself by getting the highest grade in the class. I mentioned to the teacher I had always thought I was a poor writer, and told her the story of taking English 102 five times.

The teacher said English 102 wasn’t about teaching writing, it was about teaching people to follow directions.

Thinking back, I remembered a teacher marking off points because I’d used unlined note cards. I had another teacher drop my grade because I’d used a company’s annual reports, and he felt I should have treated the different reports as one report so I didn’t have enough footnoted sources.

She was right, and my attitude toward my writing ability changed. I had assumed I was a poor writer because authority figures had mislead me. Those teacher when I was a young student told me I was a poor writer when I really was bad at following meaningless directions.

Oddly, after taking the Writing for Professions class, I never wrote another term paper. The upper level economics classes didn’t require them.

Even odder still, I never worked as an economist. I worked for 18 months as an analyst for a marketing company, then became a writer.

“Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you respond to it.”

At one time in my life, I focused on the things that happened to me. Worse than that, I exaggerated minor things in my mind and then complained endlessly about them.

I’d learned as a child not to brag about my accomplishments, while being exposed to near constant complaining about minor things.

My response to any situation was to looking for the part I could complain about.

Today I don’t do this. Today in most situations I realize it’s just life and not worth spending additional time on.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

I wrote this common saying down shortly after my brother died. I’d always thought people would become peaceful and serene when confronted with a terminal illness. I felt a strong sense of disappointment and sadness when my brother died because he had acted the same way – actually worse – in the last few months of his life.

Later I realized we can only do what we know how to do. He’d lived his whole life acting the way he did, and to expect anything different from him during his most trying period was unrealistic.

This site isn’t about him. It’s about me.

My behavior during this period was a return to my darkest past. While I congratulated myself for not doing drugs, I displayed every other inadequate behavior.

When the emotions came I didn’t have enough practice using my newly found tools. So they weren’t the tools I reached for first.

When I wrote this saying down I was first realizing the importance of becoming familiar with my tools.

The only way to become familiar is through use. By using the tools before the shit hits the fan, I train myself to reach for them first when chaos happens.

“Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away.”

I was a freshman in high school when I first heard this line from a Cheap Trick song. I was going to meet a girl at a desert party, and the police shut it down. I saw some kids I went to school with and jumped into the backseat of a car. I can still remember being squished into the backseat of a ford Capri along with two large speakers traveling through a mountain pass and hearing this line for the first time.

That night was also the first time I did LSD. I was so stricken by this line, I went out the next day and bought the album, but it never repeated the acoustics of the small car and loud sound.

Within a few months of that night I was doing LSD on almost a daily basis. I was thrown out of school for constantly ditching classes. I had begun the process of escaping into my mind.

I had surrendered to my insecurities and embraced my fantasies. The drugs became my ticket and my excuse.

Over the next 20 years, I sold myself away repeatedly. And cheaply.

Even when I managed to get off the drugs, it was only as a result of surrendering my individuality.

Today this tells me to go with the flow, but never forget who I am. I’ve forgotten this many times.

Quote from the Cheap Trick song Surrender on the album Live at Budakon

Fear of being alone keeps us in relationships we’ve outgrown.

Fear of rejection cause us to avoid meeting new people, drive people away or walk away from people before they can reject us. Then we judge them harshly so we can avoid being honest with ourselves.

Fear of responsibility leads us to keep jobs beneath our ability.

Fear of censure leads us to not standing up for ourselves and causes us to associate with people who aren’t really worth our time.

Fear of failure leads us to settle on lives that aren’t fulfilling.

To avoid exposing our fears, we blame others for our miserable boring lives.

Some of us avoid taking responsibility for our lives by giving “God” the role and then when we feel under-whelmed by our boring lives chalk it up to “God’s Will.”

When we attempt to settle in relationships, jobs, and our future, we are choosing a fear based life. Settling means choosing a fear based life.

The only way to overcome these fears is to walk through them. Define who we want to be and what kind of people we want in our lives and the walk through the fear to create the lives we want.

To create the lives we desire and deserve.