U-Turn

Hola Everybody,
Hey! I've been exercising more consistently these days!

Little by little. It takes time and momentum to create newer, healthier habits.

It amazes me how people create unrealistic expectations. Oftentimes, I see people try something half-heartedly and then proclaim that it doesn't work and give up. Or, they think about something and decide it's of no use and give up before even trying! Then we wonder why are our children are supposedly so confused?

I dunno...

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-=[ Monday Madness: The U-Turn ]=-

"Life is change, growth is optional, choose wisely."
-- Karen Kaiser Clark

I'm reading a book that asks the question, "What if you woke up one morning and realized you were living the wrong life?" LOL! I love it!

While people won't say it explicitly, I get the sense that most people feel as if they're playing a starring role in a drama they never intended to play. I get this sense from so many people that they are somehow living the wrong life

The thing is I see people do complete about faces all the time.

In fact, I'm one of those people. About 17 years ago, I was a hopelessly addicted addict in solitary confinement -- sick, malnutritioned -- it doesn't get any more hopeless than that. But something clicked right before then and many times after. My turn-around -- my about face -- happened in small increments until I evolved into the life I was meant to live.

Others change in a flash. Gandhi and the French painter, Gauguin, changed overnight and undertook causes at a great price. Gauguin was a well-to-do stockbroker leading the perfectly normal middle-class life and he just left one day. Left his wife and children and decided to become a painter. What's more, he painted in a style that was totally misunderstood by the public at the time. He lived most of the rest of his life in abject poverty and in the process condemned his wife and children to a life of destitution. Gauguin is today considered one of the greatest of the post-impressionists. I doubt that in his lifetime, Gauguin ever sold a painting for a significant sum of money. Eventually he died penniless of syphilis. But he painted until the end of his life.

That was his passion.

What's yours?

Gandhi, a chameleon if ever there was one, coined the term, "be the change you want in the world." He too was living a comfortable life until one day he came face to face with racism and it changed him forever. Whatever you might say about his inconsistencies, he was probably the single most influential pacifist in the 20^th century. His work influenced people such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh and countless others.

People do about faces all the time.

People change political parties and careers, people give up their jobs as doctors and become poets, mothers quit their families to pursue careers and athletes quit their careers to spend more time with their families. There are passive people who change and become revolutionaries for a cause they didn't care about the day before.

I guess the message is that you can change at any time, no matter what your external circumstances. The people mentioned above are no different than you in many cases. We like to say, Those people were different, they were special. We're just plain folk. Well, if you look at the history of these transformers, you notice that they were just plain folk too. In fact, some had tasted failure numerous times before they found their calling.

What will you do when you get your wake-up call? Will you just turn over and fall asleep?

Or will you heed the call?

Because I can assure of this: you will be called. Perhaps you have been called already.

Love,

Eddie