Sickness and Pain are Part of the Game

I have pulled my back again, in fact it was almost 2 weeks ago from this writing when I pulled it. The pain has been exhausting and mentally all consuming.

Above is a picture of my oldest daughter Mercedes, she was so sick that she had to sleep in the bathroom, and of course, she needed to be be cuddled…so I slept on the bathroom floor too!

After the adjustments at the chiropractor the nerve calmed down a bit but the muscles still ached incredibly. I got a massage and finally one big muscle near the lowest part of my back finally gave up and relaxed. I thought all would be well very soon…but the other side (my left) still has a muscle that is giving me pure agony and still has me hobbling around like an old man… I literally walked out of the store half hunched over as an elderly man did the same walking in!

To add to this my co-worker was extremely ill with a cold of some kind, I got it one day after him and it is a miserable beast! Congested lungs, plugged or non-stop runny nose, loogies and my favorite shortness of breath as I went to and fro for tissues and toilet paper.

This was one week into my back pain, and if two major evils joining forces should ever scare anyone, this one should terrify any and all the working class to their bones. When  you cough your back muscles tense up, when you sneeze those nerves in and around your spine light up the brightest red (whatever that means). Resting prolongs those sore spasmodic muscles while activity keeps your lungs sore and your sinuses pounding. And, as I discovered with the others who had this un-naturally powerful cold, it does not ago away for weeks!

A powerful truth has come to me over and over again as I have been working through this. When you are healthy it is a gift!

Before all this drama I have been feeling rushed, thinking I had no time to relax, work on my own things, to take care of things at work or at home. But really I have been squandering time and worrying pointlessly.

I think of the Matthew effect and how I have not used my talents. Perhaps a good solid, prolonged illness and injury is a way to show me the reality of the world and how much ability,  time, and potential I really do have.

And I have no doubt that this is to help increase my sincere gratitude for simple things, along with and also empathy for those who might be hobbling around with back pain or who may not be really responsive due to their colds or flu.

I have been meaning to get back into my blogging and other ventures, allowing all sorts of excuses to prevent me. I said at the beginning of the year that 2015 would be mind blowing, and I now have just the later half of this year to still make that true.

What are you suffering from that has increased your gratitude?

2015 will Blow your Mind!

It’s the end of 2014, of course we are reflective, remorseful, inspired, ambitious and renewed.

Chloe chilling at Grandpa house, we all really enjoyed doing a whole lot of nothing.

Over my Christmas break I had a lot of time to consider how I did this year in my life. Also what I want to do in the upcoming year. The more I thought about it…of course the more discouraged I got about not meeting a lot of goals and not feeling like I have moved forward.

But something awesome happened! As I analysed my goals and progress I was thinking of things that I could have done and will do to improve…And a wave of ‘I’m a big boy’ swept over me!

I can do whatever I want, I don’t have to do what other people tell me, I can be nerdy with lists and little helper programs and be made fun of but yet I will become superior!

That is one side of it…the other is still inspiring yet a little sadder…

What I may think is holding me back isn’t. The boss isn’t trying to make me fumble, the wife is not stealing all my money and wasting on house junk (maybe on kids junk…lol), the economy is not destroying me and most of all I REALLY DO HAVE THE TIME!

My brain is wired wrong, some major reprogramming is in order. I have a phobia of poverty, I have an excessive dread of being a wage slave all of my life. And these things are simply things that are wrong inside my head like a narcosis…

But the light at the end of the tunnel is that I really know this, that this is the reality…and I can work on that, I can change things. And then I can do the little things that nobody was stopping me from doing in the first place…and I can have the most incredible life… .. …this year(2015)!

This, and the million other things I was crunching in my mind, is why I told my wife while we drove from Utah to Alberta, that 2015 will be mind blowing!

Lets hear some craziness, what are you doing this year?

Making the Right Choice Tid Bits

Accept that if you are not willing to do this right choice right now, you will not get your BMW.

– Michael Hart

If you just can’t get yourself to do, then it is not important enough to you.

– Michael Hart (adapted from something I have heard I am sure)

You will regret the hours lost on nothing each day for years…

– Michael Hart

Give it up, you are not saving time, you are not conserving energy.

– Michael Hart

Time with Benefits

Last Sunday I gave a talk in church. I was really grateful for the opportunity because it made me realize that I am rather unorganized with all my success information and that I lacked focus.

When writing my talk I wrote a little gem about time and procrastination. It had to do with washing dishes. Simply put, dishes may require about a half hour to wash, dry and put away. I do not like doing dishes but accept that they just need to be done. I procrastinate thinking that it will be easier later, or that maybe the wife will end up doing them. The gem I found is that a half hour will pass, I can guarantee it will pass in the next half hour that you read this or any time that you set a half hour timer…that half hour is starting now and will end in exactly a half hour.

THE DIFFERENCE is wither or not you did the dishes. The half hour that passed wither you wanted it to or not, could have yielded a benefit if you did something with it. Which comes to the point and fallacy about procrastination. You CANNOT SAVE TIME, and in many ways you cannot save your personal energy as well. If either fallacy were true we would have couch potatoes with all the time in the world and enough energy to run a triathlon any moment they wish!

Knowing about these fallacies have helped me tremendously. When I want to procrastinate I just remember that I want each possible hour or half hour to have a benefit when it passes.

Fear of Risk

I keep seeing hard working, intelligent people all around me with good ideas and neat talents but still struggle with contentment, money, and just overall life (myself included).

I was listening to a 48 days podcast that touched on fear and risk…and it hit me. We all take too little risk, or better yet we are just unwilling to risk anything for the things that we want.

There is a conundrum rattling around in my mind about time being wasted on busy work and how that relates to services where people are paid to standby for the convenience of others.

The other part of the conundrum is the saving up and then doing what I’ve always wanted or finally taking risk with persistence to reach goals and dreams.

Early in my marriage my wife and I decided to get out of debt, listened to Dave Ramsey for years and years. Finally reached that last February…  I am concerned that it took just under 10 years. The majority of my 20’s was spent digging out of debt aquire in the first year or two of this decade of my age, and that was only to the tune of around $40,000. I cringe to think that if I waited to save for a down payment on a house or have an emergency fund large enough to take big risks I will be 40…

The problem there is I am trying to make a risk not a risk…and risk wasting away the years of my life not benefiting and living in fear and doubt.

The problem goes on and on, doing something stupid with no plan and no income would be stupid  but pays off now and again and whatnot.

What risks are you taking and how are they working out?

My Beginning

She is on her way!

Is Technology just Novelty?

For my birthday I got a Galaxy S5 and I love it. My old iPhone 4 was getting pretty slow. It was painful to do anything on the Facebook app. Suddenly it was like a new world opened up to me and I started blogging, chatting, tweeting and posting like I once did…then I got caught up…and ended up in the same place I was not too much earlier.

Facebook still does not have an abundance of good stuff to read, blogging still takes a few minutes to sit down and think of something worthwhile to write. Reading still takes time to digest and is still not as valuable unless I take notes.

I have found that it is the novelty of a new device (before the new phone it was a windows tablet that I ended up reading comic books on more than anything…) that rekindles the desire to participate online.

And once again I feel the sting of a truth that I, and I am sure many others, just simply wish was not true. That solutions to struggles cannot be completely solved online or through a new phone, tablet or whatever.

Granted they can help in some aspects. My current problem is that I need to make a few extra thousand dollars before a trip to the states. I have chatted with people about it and the best we have come up with is mowing yards on the side. So I have done what I can online and with the phone but now I need to go get the mower,  go to houses to get the clients and so on.

But I still keep checking Facebook hoping that more of the work will have been done for me or that I can even do the work while laying in bed and between games of ‘Cut the Rope’.

I know that many astounding things have happened online so i don’t rule it out, but I will always firmly believe that somewhere along the line the, “metal has to meet the meat” as they would say in army terms, to have something beneficial happen for you and another party.

What are your thoughts, is being on your device all day starting to feel like a vacuum as well?

What’s the Hurry?

For some purely fabricated reason,  possibly by false urgency created by society and technology, I get in terrible rushes. This mostly happens when I am queuing up my social media posts.

I will be looking through Feedly and finding really neat articles that I relate to and want to repost.  Somewhere after an article or two I suddenly feel pressed for time. I frantically look at the blog title and scan the article. Then I end up just racing to the bolded text and hurry and queue them up…with my heart racing that I did this is a few minutes.

Later if someone likes the article and wants to talk about it…I only have superficial knowledge if any knowledge on the article…which is embarrassing.

After a recent episode like this I stopped and thought to myself, “What’s the point of doing this if I only rush and nothing good comes of it?” Also, “Why am I in such a hurry?”

Will I be a failure if I don’t hurry and repost a bunch of stuff? Why not spend more time on my own blog?

The Web already has a plethora of ‘stuff’. So I have concluded that if I want any publicity I should make my own content and worry about that, and make that content of good quality that I and others would care to read it.

Are you caught in the hamster wheel of reposting content?

Focus on Steps

I made a rather large goal shortly after becoming debt free. $40,000 in savings by December 15, 2014… This has been eating me up as of late, especially since we bought a new vehicle (2005 Chevy Suburban) which ate up the nice cushion of money that we did have.

As I was wallowing in torment over this I was reading others blogs from feedly and got some good insight. Insight about making goals smaller, more reachable or really just working on the smaller goals that will lead up to the larger one.

This eased my burden and I decided to worry about the closer things and than worry about the large hairy goal later.

So now I will focus on getting around $2,000 for repairs on this newer vehicle and then $2,000 for our trip to Utah in July. That takes my problem from $40,000 $4,000 only a tenth of the size!

Now granted I still need to do something extravegant to get that surplus money. But it is not such a mighty beast to vanquish!

Have you made a massive hairy goal that you need to step back from and attack something smaller?

A Hand from the Past

We always seem to have those moments when we look back and think that we have accomplished nothing. As if no goals have ever been met. Nothing we intended to write has been written. And absolutely no progression is being made whatsoever other than the prolonging of our existence.  I was having such an episode the last week when I remember that I wrote a book…I wrote this book when I was in much worse shape than I am now, and that book really did the trick!

 

The book was “How to Survive as a Complete Failure” and it has the log of things I did to get through when I was in the depths of failing. I read it a night ago and wanted to have contempt and say that the advice would not work for me…but I wrote it, and there were examples of when that advice did work for me. Which after I get over my pity party, got excited that I could do things to make my life better and I have proof that it works and that I actually wrote it down!

I am considering putting this on Kindle Self Publish, it is only 27 pages at the moment, but perhaps I will go through it once (correct spelling and grammar and whatnot…), and any new stories or experiences and call it the 2nd edition.

This blog is exactly the same thing. When I see people asking about how to start a blog, or that they want to write but they are not writers, I think of this blog… Which I have neglected at times, but have still written. When looking back on some of the post I reveal in the fact that “this is not the most terrible thing I have read!”

A big thank you for those who have been following this blog, keep a lookout on Kindle store for the “How to Survive as a Complete Failure” book!

What accomplishments from your past give you a boost?