1 Thing That Will Not Change

You Need to Change

So do I, for that matter.

There is a revisionist attitude among the American people, and perhaps the people of all the Earth, that somehow or another, after billions of years of evolution, the world around us is suddenly going to succumb to our delightful personalities and start doing things our way.

We try to impress with our minor concessions, but change doesn’t leave much time for celebration before it rolls around with another hard request.

Repentance is not an experience, but rather, a lifestyle choice to cease arguing with truth, science, Mother Nature and a universe that has been content with its operation for multiple generations.

I have only two choices

1. Learn how it works

2. Change to how it works

Anything else brings heartache, sorrow, discontentment and mental illness.

The one thing that will not change is that you and I need to change.

• We can do it humorously.
• We can do it gracefully.
• We can do it humbly.

We will do it, though, or find ourselves replaced by more enlightened models.

 

 

 

The Alphabet of Us: Y is for You… May 25th, 2015

   Jonathots Daily Blog

(2591)

 

All human beings possess a heart, soul, mind and strength. Nothing of any true significance can be achieved unless this is understood.

Y-O-U.

Or is it Why Owe You?

Here’s the truth. If you don’t find personal satisfaction in the reality of your own life, then your discontentment will trickle down to me whether I like it or not. So I have to ask you a question. Why owe you?

Why would you want to leave yourself absent of the qualities, necessities and feelings that create an atmosphere for happiness?

Why would you listen to a generation of naysayers who portray human life as complicated, festering with tribulation, instead of looking for solutions and avenues for completion?

Why do you owe yourself, instead of paying the debt which allows you to feel free of unnecessary naggings?

First of all, recognize the symptoms. Since we are heart, soul, mind and strength people, start with your heart:

How can you tell if you’re emotionally balanced, or if you owe yourself something?

The first symptom of “heart trouble” is always frustration. If you find yourself snapping at other people, honking in traffic or feeling overwhelmed by circumstances, then realize there is some desire or yearning which you’re ignoring because you either feel it’s unrealistic or undeserved.

Yes, frustration is the clue that you owe your emotions a gift.

How can you tell if you’re spiritually in debt?

Doubt. I’m not talking about the kind of doubt that creeps into all of us when encompassed by undesirable situations. I mean self-doubt which leads to human doubt, culminating in God-doubt–when the only spiritual thing you find yourself saying is, “What the hell?”

Moving along, when we are mentally short on funding for our ideas, confusion sets in.

There are folks who think they have the first signs of dementia simply because their brains are so cluttered with doubt and frustration from the heart and soul that they can’t get traction in their thinking.

Feel confused? You owe it to your brain to clear out the fog.

And finally, your body–your strength–shows that you’re indebted to yourself by the gnawing presence of procrastination.

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Will you feel better tomorrow? Or will you feel worse because you’re one more day delinquent.

Why owe you? Why do you allow yourself to be a day late and a dollar short in your own being?

It makes you dissatisfied and causes you to come across obnoxious to the world around you.

• If you’re frustrated, track down the unfulfilled desire in your emotions.
• If you’re struggling with doubt, simplify your beliefs until you can grab onto something and run with it.
• If you’re confused, realize that you have a traffic jam of frustration and doubt that prevents you from thinking straight.
• And if you find yourself procrastinating, realize that it’s the culmination of fear which makes you believe you can’t pull off your purposes.

You should always think about YOU.

When you don’t, you either try to become noble and end up with a persecution complex, or you become overly secretive and end up being diagnosed as neurotic.

 

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Untotaled: Stepping 48 (May 15th, 1969) Mr. Lester’s Work Force… January 3, 2015

  Jonathots Daily Blog

(2462)

 

(Transcript)

By the time I walked out of school, I was a different person.

Less than a month earlier, my father had passed, and a growling discontentment, which had started in the previous September, had now turned into a barking dog of frustration.

I was tired of school.

I was tired of my little town.

I was tired of being a student.

I was tired of having urges and desires that were ignored by my local church and replaced with a series of childish activities.

I was nearly a man, forced to wear boyish attire.

My mother decided I should get a job. She thought it would keep all of the sadness off my mind.

That year, the local Youth Corps was offering employment to students to assist local businessmen in their pursuits, at $1.10 an hour. I signed up. They placed me in the role of helping out the local groundskeeper at the cemetery.

Not exactly the perfect job for a young man who had just lost his dad.

There was no grave-digging involved. My responsibility was to mow around the tombstones in a fourteen-day pattern. By the time I finished the fourteenth sector of the cemetery, it was time to go back to the first section and start all over again.

I could not imagine anything that personified the futility of my soul like this particular ritual.

I hated it–especially when it came time for sector four–which included my father’s grave. Actually it was just a pile of dirt. It was too soon for grass to have grown. And I felt compelled, by some sense of nostalgia, to stop and pay my respects.

Yet it was odd and obtuse.

As I mowed–especially on the very hot days–there was this strange smell in the air. It reeked of concentrated vitamins, similar to what you experience when you open up a new bottle. It gave me the creeps.

Since my supervisor rarely showed up at the cemetery, I decided to sign the worksheet with my hours and not actually appear. Amazingly, I pulled this off for two weeks before I got caught.

Mr. Lester, my representative, was very disappointed in me. I was fired.

I was mostly relieved, for two reasons: I didn’t have to keep lying, but mostly … I didn’t have to keep working.

 

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Untotaled: Stepping 38 (Fall of 1967) Parallel Universe… November 1, 2014

 Jonathots Daily Blog

(2399)

(Transcript)

1967.

Fall came. Fall fell.

It seemed to me that the autumn leaves, as they tumbled from the trees, were mocking me for my lack of purpose.

I was bored.

I was also infested by a scratchy discontentment–an itch. I wanted my driver’s license. I was so close.

Even more infuriating was that Jack, from my class, had gotten his license because he’d flunked the sixth grade and was older than the rest of us. Sporting his beat-up Chevy, he drove as a god among us. Suddenly a fellow that normally made the lasses of our class say “yuck” when he walked by was the center of attention from these fair young maidens. Everybody wanted to ride in Jack’s car.

It was aggravating to any young boy in Central Ohio with a shred of dignity and an overabundance of arrogance. That would be me.

I convinced my older brother to take me to a parking lot behind the high school on Sunday afternoons to practice driving, since we knew that the local cop was always at his church teaching the youth group during that time.

The terrifying part of the whole rehearsal was the spectre of having to pass the test on parallel parking. Some local citizen had placed two markers in the back lot by sticking a broomstick in a bucket of cement so that teenagers could put themselves through the paces of trying to place a two-and-a-half ton automobile into the tiny enclosure.

I think what frightened me the most was that I heard through the grapevine that you had to get your tires within six inches of the curb or you would fail. Who could do such a thing? This was a deed more suited for the gods of Chrysler.

But finally, since clocks do move forward, December 18th rolled around and I went to get my license.

As it turned out, I was the last prospect of the day for an instructor who was on his way home to Pennsylvania for Christmas. He was giddy, overjoyed and in a hurry.

The whole test took three-and-a-half minutes–and there was no parallel parking.

Being a stupid teenager, I asked him why we had skipped it. He looked at me, bewildered, like a man who had given a friend a thousand dollars and was wondering why his buddy was commenting on the wrinkles in the bills. He smiled, patted me on the shoulder and said, “Good luck, and drive safely. And Merry Christmas.”

I was a licensed driver. I, too, could be a god–even though it was going to be God Two in our school.

What did I learn during this experience? What lesson concerning worry and trepidation was passed on to me about how life is never what we think it’s going to be?

Well, since I have a tendency to adhere to an unnecessary parcel of negativity, what did I learn?

Not much.

 

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Populie: Poor, Poor People … September 3, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog

(2341)

The most wealthy woman I have ever known once complained to me that she was having difficulty meeting her needs.

I realized at that point that poverty is not merely a state of finance, but more often than not, a state of mind.

So it is popular to believe that there are poor people.

The populie comes when we say poor, poor people. It stimulates the sensation of pity. Unfortunately, pity is a two-edged sword.

There is pity that manifests itself as, “I feel so sorry for those homeless and impoverished souls.”

And then there is pity that proclaims, “Look at those people. I’m sure glad I’m not like them.”

They share one thing in common: they turn fellow-human beings into victims.

And once we victimize people, it is very easy to marginalize them and make them less important, or even worse, non-human.

Even though we profess to be a socially aware populace, we still subject those who are less fortunate to live in communities where there are more drugs, more liquor stores and no groceries available without paying a high price and selecting unhealthy foods.

Religion loves “poor, poor people” because it gives them a constituency. It grants them a congregation which is so dependent on mercy that they have to come to church, pray and believe in God.

Politics loves the issue because it divides people between believing we can solve the poverty issue and insisting that poverty is caused by laziness. Go to the booth and cast your vote.

Entertainment–well, entertainment loves it any time that it can box people up into categories and postulate on the extremes of the situation, to develop a dramatic or comedic outcome.

“The poor you will have with you always.”

• Poverty is not going away.
• We’re not going to wipe it out in our lifetime.
• There’s no vaccine against it, nor medication to cure it.

Every chance we get, we should do what we can for others without becoming obsessed with the need. Here’s what is necessary to relieve yourself of the emotional, spiritual, mental and physical presence of poverty:

1. Change your location.

If you were a farmer planting seed in a field that bore no crops, you would certainly hunt out new ground. I have seen people improve their prosperity simply by moving. We have a tendency to surround ourselves with people in a similar plight to our own. This breeds a lack of motivation. Make a new plan, Stan, and hit the road, Jack.

2. Refuse pity.

Every time someone tries to be kind to me by feeling sorry for me, I reject it. Sometimes they’re offended, but usually they are so relieved that they don’t have to continue to be my support system that we actually become better friends.

Pity is offering to put you into a cave. Refuse it. Have an idea. And keep your faith.

3. Work your best.

Don’t wait for someone to give you something to do. You will always end up with what they don’t want to do.

Find out what you’re good at and start doing it–even if it’s in a small way–so people can find you, encourage you and use you to perform the duty for them.

Stop experimenting on things you hope for and start perfecting what you know.

“Poor, poor people” is the populie. It’s a formula for keeping people poor.

The only truly spiritual way to treat poverty is to do what you can for folks while you encourage them to go out and do what they can for themselves.

 

 

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Five Signs You Are Doing Fine… November 13, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

(2066)

We do not need discouragement to be discouraged.

We are human, capable of getting depressed on our birthday because of the possibility of our imminent death.

Once you realize that we, as a species, are tuned to the negative–and you also come to the realization that merely “acting positive” does not stimulate extra energy or true emotion, you can realistically look at the barometers which allow sunshine to enter our lives instead of dark clouds.

I can think of five of them–a quintet of good signs for “people mental health.”

1. “I don’t complain.”

That doesn’t mean I like everything that happens–but complaining is a mask we wear for arrogance, which stifles our possibilities and eliminates grace from working in our spirits.

2. “I am learning.”

I can always pick out folks who are in trouble because they are resistant to the notion of change and won’t admit that they require refreshing.

3. “I know my gifts.”

Let me give you a definition of gift: a gift is a talent or ability which when applied, normally allows me the opportunity to overcome my difficulty.

4. “I am aware of my limitations.”

There is a power in knowing when to say, “I can’t do that.” It opens the door to collaboration and provides the opportunity for someone more suited to the position to provide excellence.

5. “I am looking for reasons to join in fellowship instead of alienating myself from others.”

If you believe that “NoOne is better than anyone else,” you will constantly be looking out for fellow travelers to chat with and to energize you as you exhort them.

Church attendance is dropping in this country because it’s no longer popular to believe. But it is also drooping because we don’t like each other anymore.

Take a look at that list and realize that a complaining know-it-all who has an over-assessment of his or her ability, and thinks they don’t have weaknesses and avoids interaction with other humans which might create change is probably the most dangerous bomb in the world. They are flesh, stuffed with the explosive of discontentment.

There are your five signs that you are doing fine. Think about them. Better yet, keep a good sense of humor as you change the ones that are undercutting your joy and success.

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