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What Do I Stand For?

 For many years in my life I had no idea what I stood for. I had some sort of idea about things that I liked. And they had no real standing in my life. You see, I was a chameleon. I changed my actions, attitudes, and behaviors, to fit the people that I was around. I never stood for anything that you did not also stand for. It made for a very lonely experience of life. Sooner or later, mostly sooner, people saw that I was pretty much empty of any real conviction. I also had no sense of my own identity, of who I was as a Human Being. And, in the end, I was surrounded by people just like me. No real conviction, no real sense of self, just anger and self pity. After I began a journey of healing I found out that this also was, by necessity, a journey of Self Identification. And, over time, thru the 12 Steps of Narcotics Anonymous , a lot of reading and reflecting, and a journey thru the Landmark Curriculum for Living, I began the process of healing and discovering who in the world this str
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Responsibility. What A Concept :-)

For most, if not all, of the first half to three quarters of my life I lived in a world where I was never responsible. It was NEVER my fault. And the excuses and blaming of others just flowed out of me. If it did not show verbally then it showed in my actions, attitudes, and behaviors. Eventually, I began to start to take responsibility for my life. And it has been a process. It has taken a long time and a lot of internal work. And today I am responsible for my life. I sometimes need to reclaim responsibility after falling back into the old way of being involving excuses and blame. And that is getting less and less as time goes on. And as I am looking around me today I am seeing that there is a large chunk of people both in this country and around the world who do not want to be responsible. They are looking for the Strong Man Savior type of person to save them. And it occurs to me that if you need a savior then you are not being responsible for your life. In fact, when I was being not
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How I Act and/or React

 When I was young I developed a set of really unhealthy coping mechanisms to a life that I did not like and scared the living heck out of me. One of the biggest is I became a Reactionary. Instead of having a considered response to anything I had an emotional reaction to everything. They were automatic and required no thought or consideration. I was like a push button automaton. Everything I felt, said, and displayed just rolled out. No thought required. And for many years that is how I rolled. And I kept wondering why my life was a mess all the time. As I began a journey of healing and discovery I had to learn how to Respond instead of React. And when all I have done in my life is react then replacing it with responding is difficult. To say the least. And just to clarify, a Reaction is an automatic response that requires no intellectual effort, no thinking, and is preprogrammed, and usually fueled by emotion. It happens instantly. A Response is something that does require thought. It r
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Evil is Banal

"What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out—its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness? What kept him steady, long after all possibility of thinking about something else had disappeared, was the decision that if he must hear either the word Ransom or
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I Am The Creator

 So many different times in my life I was in a place of misery that I was not finding enjoyable at all. In my negative, at that time, view of life I was not finding any part of my life uplifting or enjoyable. And I had no idea that it could be any different. I just figured that this was my life and that was all there was to it. Nothing was ever going to change. Pretty bleak way to exist in life in my point of view. Many years later, or ago, depending on the perspective, I began my journey of life. And I say began because I feel that I was not truly living before this. I was merely existing. Going through the motions one could say. And as I learned how to be a Human Being I began  to see that all along I had been making choices about how to live and, more importantly, who I Am as a Human Being. And even though those choices were made not knowing that I had choices I was still making those choices. By default. It is kinda like the old thing in court, Ignorance of the Law is no excuse for
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Well That Didn't Look Like What I Wanted

 I remember when I was young, probably in my preteen years, I had this fantasy about being a Rock and Roll Drummer in a band. I obsessed over that idea for several years. So one day my Step Father handed me this square thing made of wood with a round rubber pad on it. It was a gift, I think for my birthday. And I had no understanding of what this was. He tried to explain t me that this was a drum pad. And that this is what new drummers started with to learn timing etc. And he was correct. I now believe that he went to a music store and the people there had explained all this too him and he had given me that to help me to get started based on their advice. So I believe. I will never know. This did not look like a drum set to me. This did not look like anything having to do with learning how to be a drummer. And it was definitely NOT what I wanted. And today I feel badly about this. After all, my Step Father, Henry, was doing the best he could to help me realize a dream that I had. And I
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Time

 "Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we lived." Jon Luc Picard, Captain/Retired Admiral Starfleet (Played Marvelously by Patrick Stewart) When I was young, very young, the word Time had no meaning for me. It was the moment that I was in that was important. A day was an incomprehensible eternity. I could not fathom what that meant. It did not matter, to me anyway, that I had no concept of time. After a bit, a few years I began to get a stumbling concept of time. It began when I started noticing that each day, while long, was not infinite. It had a beginning and an end. And, after some more time, I began to distinguish hours, minutes, and seconds. My sense of time and it's meaning began to flesh out for me. Later on in life, when I
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