U-Turn

Hola mi Gente,

This is the longest I have been without regular work in 20 years. Sometimes it’s hard to keep sight of the light of the end of this dark tunnel. Still, every day I wake up, I wake up a winner. I already won today. Besides, regardless of my employment status, there’s this beautiful thing called life happening all around me. Gotta grab it by the throat while I still can. LOL

On another note, I am hoping to attend the Sanders rally in the South Bronx later today at the South Bronx’s St. Mary’s Park. More info here. I am not a Sanders’ supporter, but there is no question in my mind that he offers a viable and pragmatic alternative to the corporate democrat, Hillary Clinton. Some have even accused me of exercising my “privilege” clearly ignorant of my Puerto Rican heritage. My response is, you need to recognize your privilege if you think can afford a possible eight years of Hillary Clinton and the status quo. Because I don’t know about you, but I clearly understand that eight years of more fracking, more mass incarceration and the private prison industry, eternal war, and the military takeover of democratically elected foreign governments, is untenable.

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The Life You Were Meant to Live

Life is change, growth is optional, choose wisely.

 -- Karen Kaiser Clark

I once read a book that asked 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, in my work 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 26 years ago, I was a hopelessly addicted addict in solitary confinement -- sick, suffering from years of malnutrition, totally defeated -- 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 feel 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 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 of syphilis and penniless. 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 was confronted 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 such people 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 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 change agents, 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. 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...