A Variety of Thoughts About Everything

 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...

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...

 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. ...