Month: September 2019

Waiting to Live…

On By Papa TonyIn ThoughtLeave a comment

Imagine you found yourself with just three months left to live. After you got past the dread of it all, what would you do? It seems you would seek to spend your remaining time on the things that mattered most. In the front of your mind would be all of the people who you love, with you most assuredly making the commitment to make sure they knew just how much. Your moments would all become precious and you would take nothing for granted. Putting things off for the future would quickly become a thing of the past. You would endeavor to live your last days with all that you are. Well, my friend, you don’t need a death sentence to stop waiting to live…

Most people have become adept at the waiting game. They are waiting for the conditions to be just right. They are waiting to have enough money. They are waiting to reach a certain age or get married or have some kids. They are waiting to feel good or safe. They are always looking to some future day when all they ever wanted will have finally arrived. They are waiting until they get off of work or for the weekend or for that grand vacation next month. But sadly, the majority of your life will be lived in the spaces in-between. Life is found in each new moment of the day. It’s getting ready in the morning. It’s driving to work. It’s getting ready for bed. It’s the mundane and the routine. It’s happiness and struggles, joy and pain. It’s feeling at ease and feeling threatened. It’s having what you need and not having what you need. It’s life and all that goes with it.

It seems logical then, seeing we are all in this thing together, that your job is to learn how to live your life. Your task is to embrace the struggle. Get into the fight. Stop putting off and putting up with everything. Quit waiting for another day. Do the things that matter now. Capitalize on the moments that are now. Use your time available now, not when you get past the next big problem. Choose good thoughts right now, not when it looks like things are lining up. Be happy and uplifting and kind. Love people, bless people, help people! In short, be that wonderful person you really are inside today, not later when circumstances get better; not after you get the promotion; not when people finally treat you right, but right frikkin now, today!

You see, the grand deception is that you will always have more time. You can do it tomorrow, figure it out tomorrow, get better tomorrow. And while you are living with unlimited tomorrows, nothing worthwhile gets done today. Oh you can do important stuff, serious stuff, but do those things really impact your life in meaningful and fulfilling ways? Are those things you focus on today the things that will take your focus when your life becomes very short? None of us have unlimited days (at least not in this life), so our number one priority is to make our days count. Live with purpose, on purpose with all that you have and all that you are! Learn new things. Pursue new goals. Those things where you already excel, excel all the more! Give what you have got to give. All of you! All of the time!

Every one of us is unique and has a special place in the world. No-one can duplicate you and all that you are. But, you have to get busy doing you! You have to move beyond the endless distractions and threats and worries, into something new, namely what you have to offer to the world. What good part of you have you been holding back? What loveliness, what deep love and concern, what passion have you been extinguishing while you wait and wait for that day that never comes? What supreme goodness exists inside of you that you keep waiting to give out? Give yourself! Pour yourself out! Produce what only you can produce. Write it, paint it, sculpt it! Do it! Do it now! If you don’t do it, it won’t get done, at least not in the way you were supposed to do it!

Your mind was designed to thrive in the moments called now. All your energy, your perceptions, your insights, your love, are there for you right now. The thrill in the vast unexplored life exists now. The untapped learning, the excitement of new things, the beauty and unparalleled variety are here right now. But, you can only begin to perceive them when you finally decide to stop waiting to live, waiting to love, waiting for the future, but instead live now! Why not be the best employee; the best husband; the best father or mother; the most loving, kind person, now? Why settle for a 60% version of yourself? Why be satisfied with a C? Why fool yourself into believing you could be all you ever wanted to be, while still holding the best part of you back? Indeed, write the song, invent the tool, start the group, but do it now!

You don’t have to wait to navigate the uncertainty of your time running out soon, to make the decision to live! You can choose to live right now, today! You can go all in! You can leave it all out on the field! You can say what you have always wanted to say, be who you always wanted to be, do all you ever wanted to do, right now with all that you are! Don’t spend another day waiting for a future day to live. Live right now, in this moment, as if it was your last, because in a sense it is your last as you can’t ever get those moments back! Be the person you know to be today! You can! You must! Stop waiting. Live life; your life, now!

I love you…

Just some good thoughts…

 

 

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Getting Unstuck (Take It On Already)…

On By Papa TonyIn ThoughtLeave a comment

I would hazard a guess, based on my personal experience, age and general listening plus paying attention, that many people get stuck along the way in life. Something happened or didn’t happen. They have endured some affliction. Some gotcha got them or even they may have enjoyed way too much of a good thing for way too long… Suffice it to say, they have become stuck, as in not moving forward, aka stopped in their tracks, fast forward, stagnating away in a perpetual pool of nothing happens. What sticks it to you to make you stuck and how can you escape it?

All of life is on the move. Only dead things stay still. You can either egress or digress. You flourish or you wither. You continue to grow or you begin to die. No matter how you wrap it, life was designed to involve forward action. People, in general, are at their best as long as they are moving towards something. You don’t have to be in a full sprint and at times you are allowed to pause, but when you stop altogether, that’s where the trouble starts. People stop moving for a variety of different reasons. Some find themselves embroiled in a problem for which there appears to be no solution. Others have long given up on their dreams or accepted the falsity that they had no dreams. Some think they are too old, too fat, too dumb, too lazy or too anything that convinces them it’s okay to surrender. For others it may be a mistake they made 40 years ago or even last month. Some are just plain old worn out by life. Regardless of the shape or form it comes in, ceasing from forward movement is always not true!

Full speed living means that you take on an issue as soon as it appears. Like children do so beautifully, you create a large fuss about your needs not being met then not let it go until something happens. Children are persistent. Adults are complacent. Children are honest. Adults lie to themselves to make things okay. Children ask for help right away. Adults ask for help just after all hell has broken loose. The quickest and easiest way to solve a problem is right when it occurs. You take it on and deal with it right now! Letting things go, a national epidemic, allows our difficulties and troubles to become entrenched. Once entrenched, like allowing yourself to weigh too much, is that much harder from which to escape. And, your habits of letting it go must be confronted with that much more resolve, a habit you have not been practicing. Then, no wonder you find yourself stuck! People aren’t talked out of their dreams overnight. They are talked out of them over days and months and years. You can’t become too old or too fat or too lazy unless you have let something go for too long! You are worn out not by life, but by your refusal to fight back. Even mistakes, no matter how egregious, represent a moment in time; one you can never get back.

Each precious day of your life you are in a contest. Your mind is the arena. You can battle and strive or you can give in and retreat, but no matter what you do, you are in a fight. Wishing away the fight won’t end the fight. Ignoring the fight just leads to eventual defeat because you are still getting hit. Numbing yourself to the fight is more of the same. You have to learn to fight back! You have to learn what exactly is going on. If you don’t and many, many don’t, then you lose. You get stuck then whittled away in a shitty existence always wishing you would have and should have etc. And worse, all that crap that’s been threatening you a lifetime starts settling in on you. Can’t you see it? You stopped moving forward. You quit fighting for yourself. You gave in…

Your life is not over, no matter what has happened or where you find yourself! You may have stopped moving for awhile, but if you are reading this, it aint over yet! You still have hope. You can change once you finally learn what has been perpetually kicking your butt! But, learn you must. You aren’t alone in your quest. In fact, you are just like all the rest of us. You are in the contest because all people are in the contest. You may not have been competing very well, but you can learn to compete. You can learn what it means to fight spiritually with spiritual enablements and quit relying on your intelligence, your brain, your extreme rationality. You can see because God wants you to see. All you need is a little humility and a little willingness to ask for help. Or you can sit there, defeated, pretending to be okay, and wait for the end. “Why sit we here until we die?”

The simplest way out of your dilemma is to begin moving forward again. Move forward! Stop looking around you bewildered, confused, distressed and decide to make a move. Take some action. Come to my Bible fellowship. Pray about it and then listen carefully. Read your Bible. Talk to a friend. Do something. Don’t just sit there mentally, do something. You will quickly learn that once you make a move, God makes a move. Once you act, God acts. God won’t make you move (trust me), but He will honor your believing efforts. There is an answer. There are always answers.

No matter how entrenched you’ve become in that giant bowl of spaghetti, know this, once long ago there was just one piece of pasta, from which you could easily escape. You just need to start grabbing at the strands, one at a time until they’re all gone. With God’s help you can do it. You can move ahead. You can the life you have imagined!

Just some good thoughts…

 

Getting Out of Your Own Head…

On By Papa TonyIn ThoughtLeave a comment

Have you ever had a scenario play out where the answer to your dilemma was something totally unexpected or not at all what you had envisioned? At times in life, in your personal distress and commitment to solving a problem, you conclude that the more time you spend in resolution activities; the more you expend yourself in searching for a solution; the more you refuse to let it go, the more likely you are to come across the answer. But, what if it doesn’t work that way at all? What if the answer isn’t to keep seeking, but rather to simply move ahead. What if the peace you are after comes not from holding onto but rather from releasing? Maybe you just need to get out of your own head.

Have you ever had the experience whereby the harder you try to remember something the more elusive it becomes, but when you finally let it go, it comes to you perfectly and without any strain. Life wasn’t intended to be brought about by strain. Nature doesn’t strain. Love doesn’t strain. The best things in life come about as naturally as breathing or sleeping. But, if you obsess over your breathing or falling asleep both become impossible and labored. That alone should prove to you that life was not designed to spring forth from strain, but instead the absence of it. That which you do with stress; with ardent pressing; with over-effort fails to deliver the things you need the most.

Your human condition; your ego; your insistence on solving your problems yourself lead only to frustration. Stress and worry promise that if you put in enough time; enough focus; enough persistence you will eventually find the solution. But, has it ever been successful? Have you ever, in the midst of your frenetic worry, been able to get to anything useful or helpful? If you are honest you know that only after you have conceded or in your futility and misery decided to let it go, have you been able to see something you weren’t able to see before. In the absence of troubling worry your answer comes; it always comes as it necessarily must. Anxiety and worry serve no other purpose than to drive you inward and keep you there. In churning and debating and distressing you begin to work against yourself. You cease from helping and instead hinder.

Getting out of your own head is about recognizing just how much time to give a thing. It’s determining quickly whether this issue; this false threat to your existence;  this foreboding series of thoughts deserve your valuable time and attention. Perhaps you have been feeling like maybe something is wrong with your body. In the final analysis if something is wrong it will come forth whether you like it or not. It will reveal itself. No amount of consideration on your part will alter that reality. And, God forbid, you would have to take on and deal with that reality. Your hours spent in dutiful consideration would have no impact on that reality. Instead they would serve only to rob you of the moment that is right now. Day after day, night after night absorbed in worry and fear would do nothing to change  that reality, but instead encourage it. In short, all that time spent in your own head will profit you nothing! Also, I should add, most of the time that dreaded  reality was not a reality at all, but rather a skillfully executed drain on your existence.

Getting out of your own head is based upon understanding just what it is you do and do not control! What part has been assigned to you to manage and what part are you not supposed to try to manage? Trying to manage affairs out of your control is a prescription for heartache and pain. No human that has ever lived has successfully thought their way out of things over which they have no control! Good thinking; excellent problem solving skills; exceptional capacities to discern difficulties are all powerless against things in which they have no power. Dwelling on and living in those variables does nothing more than to keep you captured, a prisoner in your own thinking.

Hidden behind your insistence in solving all your problems with your thoughts is fear. You are afraid! You are terrified that something is going to get you. And you know of yourself that there is really nothing you can do to protect yourself. All of your time spent sincerely seeking a solution to things that threaten you are wasted time, failing to recognize where true protection and guidance come from. Your preservation from the awful things in life come only from God. He alone can preserve you and watch over you. You alone won’t get the job done. Thus, time spent challenging that assertion is wasted time; pointless activity.

Getting out of your own head means to leave your problems; your issues; your dilemmas with God and to move the hell on!  Let it go. Let them go! Get outside your own head. Walk away. Drop it all off. Pitch them all into God’s bucket and if you accidentally take them back, pitch them all in again. Refuse the temptation to solve fear because you aint going to solve it! Fear, always an illusion, cannot be solved by consideration, but only by refusal of consideration. Fear and worry must be starved out. Thinking and stressing and worrying act as food strengthening and encouraging fear towards more and more damage. Thank God for taking care of you and give it ALL to Him! Walk away my friend, walk away…

Your life, though you may not yet be convinced, was not supposed to be focused on everything that could go wrong. You are not equipped to take on the prospect of every bad thing that might assault you. Instead you were intended to give it all to something, Someone much bigger and smarter than yourself! In doing so, you are finally able to relax; to trust; to rely on Someone else to care for you. That is real, blessed life. That is getting out of your own head!

Just some good thoughts…