image: akcija

Choices are the axis around which a self electing life revolves.

 We make choices and stand or fall by the positions those choices place us in. It can be seen that the path you have followed in your life has been defined by the choices that you have made. Significantly it may also be seen that where your life will lead you will be guided by choices you have not yet made.

Strangely enough, the choices you have not yet made are already there, waiting to be actuated by you. How can I say this? It’s quite simple really; we all play roles in our lives. We play roles much as we wear our clothes, they’re not all the same.

There is the professional you, the serious you, the playful you, the dramatist you and many more besides - you could fill a book with the different roles you play. When we are young we do play, children love to play, and what they play is to summon roles that exist in the collective consciousness of all humans and act out according to the role. So young kids might play mummies and daddies, cops and robbers and any number of different character portrayals they have been exposed to.

Over time these roles are absorbed subliminally. Almost as though we wear a path through a virgin territory, and if we consider Descartes description of us as a tabla raisa or a blank slate, that is how it is. We start empty, or at least the character portrayal bank does, and we deposit impressions and situations we have been exposed to in there.

Here is the crucial bit. Over time a critical mass develops and instead of us choosing to play roles, they start to play us. We become consumed by the role and end up doing things, finding ourselves in situations that we had no idea or inclination about. This is the role, it compels us to act in certain ways.

This is why I can make the statement that the decisions you will make are already made for you by the role that you will play. This should be a little disconcerting because it means, if it’s true, that you are not in control of your own life. It means that your time, energy and your faculties have been in a sense held to ransom by the roles you play.

So we get people doing jobs they never wanted to do, marrying people they never wanted to be with, committing themselves to things they don’t really have a compelling relationship with. This leads to disquiet, discord and disharmony. The net result of which is a background noise of things not being quite as they should be.

This does not mean that there is anything wrong with roles, it is saying that you owe it to yourself to be in control of them and to manage them according to the life you want to live rather than struggling to cope with the existence you discover yourself a part of.

The single most difficult thing in life is personal development because it dominates everything you do. Your responses, your choices, your assessment of situations, your understanding, cognizance and perception. The person you are is defined exclusively by the level of personal development you have managed to attain in your life. This is done through intense study of self, modelling the person you are quite literally as a sculptor models a piece of clay or hews a piece of marble.

It is a lifetime’s endeavour and is only ever undertaken thoroughly by the few. It is not for the faint of heart or the weak of will. The world is an arcade of distractions that will allow you to live out a hedonist’s lifestyle without so much as a backward glance. To tackle this requires huge reserves of character and strength, personal integrity and a desire to change and improve what you already have.

I was speaking with a young person today. We talked about characters in computer games, heroes in particular and I asked the young person: ’What compels a hero? What makes them do the things they do?’

He wasn’t sure what I meant so I explained: ‘These guys fight evil, they perform extraordinary feats and so on but why? Why do they do what they do? If they want to save the world, why do they want to do it? What is it about the world that they want to save in particular, because it’s not all good? If they’re defending the weak from some malevolent baddie: why? What drives them? What has been the inciting incident in their life that makes them suddenly change or forces them to make a decision?’

We moved on like this and the young person started to get the idea that people are like they are for some reason, whether it’s a choice they’ve made or a situation they’ve found themselves in that’s backed them into a corner.

That person is you. It’s me. It’s all of us. It’s a component of the human condition.

The decisions we make define who we are. The choices we make determine how we will travel. 

 image: mafic

There isn’t room for moral ambiguity. Your life is really a one shot deal, semantics and philosophy can lead you some merry dances but this is all we know for certain. Faith is wonderful, belief is tremendous but their foundations are less than empirical, there is a certain degree of trust in agencies beyond our influence that drive these two charioteers and their companion, hope.

That they may exist and that there may be sound arguments in support of adhering to the counsel of these three retainers is not disputed by this writer. What is being alluded to here is the placing of one’s foundations in certainties and absolutes. What we know for certain is that we are here now and have a process going on. That may not always be so, in fact it definitely will not always be so in this form but the unknown there is when.

Therefore it is crucial that you are clear about what you do and the reasons why you do it. This is the true benchmark of where your life is. Not the stuff that is automatic and that you had no part in the genesis of, but those things that are unique to your life and your circumstance. You didn’t create the world, you didn’t create the computer screen you’re reading this on, they were here before you and came into existence despite you so you can’t really take the credit for them.

What you can do is take credit for the way you conduct yourself within that. I suppose it might be known in the vernacular as the arsehole question: are you an arsehole and if so why? There is no obligation upon any of us to be anything we don’t want to be. Even in the most dire circumstances there are still individuals who preserve their own dignity and integrity without succumbing to the law of the jungle.

Your question has to be, how dire are my circumstances? And yes it’s subjective, it’s all a matter of perception, there are some people running around out there very well provided for who’ve managed to shove their heads so far up their own backsides they’re seeing daylight out of their own mouths. If your life and its potential mean anything to you then these are matters you will give time to, meditate upon, consider and come to your own position upon. It’s not what you do that counts, it’s the reason why you do it that matters and likewise it is not your circumstance that matters but how you respond to it.

Be you pauper or prince, a mentor or a knave, at the top of the chain or the bottom, all are brother and sister, we are all defined to some extent by the actions of each of us and the affairs of the human race are what characterize us all.  None of us escapes the human condition, the art is to celebrate it and champion that which is best and progressive. We are capable of extraordinary things and can grasp concepts at the edge of the Universe, we can do and be better. You can do it.

 image: e-chan

I attended a seminar today on the prevalence of ADHD in young people. Among other things that I do in a professional capacity, I have helped and supported kids like this for some years now. It’s extraordinary to discuss with other people those things that become acquired skills and how, as we evolve as individuals, those skills become a part of the portrait that our lives represent.

In many respects a responsible adult surrogates their sensibilities into the world of an individual who may be experiencing a chaotic reality. Their own cognitive process and ability to rationalise what their sensory apparatus is telling them is compromised by a range of factors. These range from the genetic to the stalled or simply dormant.

For us all the process of personal development has its mechanics rooted in the programming of our neural pathways. Put simply, the more we energize a particular route the more established within our repertoire as individuals it becomes. Given poor guidance, the absence of positive mentors or a compromised education we grow in an incomplete way. The pathways that become charged are those that are often the least beneficial to the person who has become their host. In pop culture this is known as the development of bad attitude. A fragmented development occurs, some things become accentuated and some things neglected which gives rise to a disjointed process characterised by the manifestation of inappropriate behaviour and poor decision making in our lives.

The art or the skill is in developing a sophisticated inner compass that negotiates the highways and byways along which we travel. There will always be opportunity for conflict and drama, but likewise there will be the opportunity for seamless passage from one chapter to the next in the unfolding of our lives. These things are seen in the skills present within the diplomat, the negotiator, the orator and the leader who seems to have the ability to make complicated processes appear simple and glaringly obvious.

In our own lives we must strive toward the assimilation of such skills, we must learn to be accomplished in the business of living so that our lives give the impression of being very simple, harmonious and gliding through the turbulent waters of the ocean of humanity like a sleek craft. When that impression is conveyed successfully the natural magic of life is such that the act will have become real, we will have powered those neural pathways, those synapses in such a way that a crystaline structure forms in our own mind and our own behavioural patterns.

For those who share a love of the esoteric, your reference here is the mummer’s art, the craft of Shakespeare and the ability to sublimate oneself to the already proven and demonstrated. In the movie Patton, the general surveys the scene of an ancient battlefield where the Carthaginians were defeated by the Romans and suggests that he was there, two thousand years before, this before he defeated Erwin Rommel, the finest military strategist in the German army. His allusion being that great warriors were in some way immortal, destined to reincarnate and fight military campaigns throughout time.

I do not know. However, the inference here is that the record of greatness exists and may be somehow accessed by any of us. That is a powerful notion, a singularly immense concept suggesting that we are all, in some way, washed by the same stream of life and that by proxy we are interconnected in a way that transcends the spatio-temporal concepts of here and now.

What we each have in our grasp is such a magnificent opportunity, I can do no more than salute those of you who pioneer the human story in your own way, whatever that may be. Strength, resilience and fortitude.

image: haani

Success is a pejorative word. It’s like normal or good, it can mean a million things to a million people. Here’s a simple call over that I use when assessing the merits of any given situation or person.

It’s not about where you are, it’s about where you’ve come from.

Simple really. For some the word success conjures images of penthouses in the hottest property spots, owning a tropical island paradise, driving the latest and greatest supercar and attending the coolest events on the social circuit.

Of course for most of us that is a world that we don’t engage directly with and it’s more likely that the characteristics of success are relative and more subjective. As another potential famine hits another unstable African country, success is a bowl of rice. For a junkie in rehab or any substance addict, success is another day without falling off the wagon.

To make your life a success is to refine the components of what gives rise to happiness. Often it is small things, those events that are life affirming, the touch of a loved one, a smile from a stranger, spontaneous outpourings of mirth, good conversation along the way.

Part of the mechanics is to have clearly defined goals and a clearly defined strategy of how you can achieve those goals. Stay in what’s real. Don’t miss out any of the intervening stages between where you are now and where you want to be. The journey of where you are has been paved with multiple successes along the way, many of which you may know little or nothing about. Be settled to the fact that your life is a supported and maintained occurrence within a magical symphony of happenings.

Remember, what matters is where you’ve come from, that defines the person you are far more significantly than the person you want to be. Where you want to be is an objective, a journey yet to come and an aspiration. Fantastic and a massive ‘YES!’ to all those things, but reality exists within what is and what has already been. Your success is already defined by the fact of your reading this which indicates multiple accomplishments already.

Look out and around and at what is. Think of where you have come from, that is a measure of success.