Intro

It’s eight days until my 50th birthday and I still haven’t given up, not completely. I mean, ultimately, if you were to give up you would stop yourself from living. That’s a different catagory of “giving up” and not what I’m talking about here, obviously, because these are my fingers typing. What I mean is that I still believe that I am bigger than the world. I’m bigger than the trouble and the injustice.

I’m still defining myself first, like a child, rather than settling into what the world wants me to be or says that I am. Don’t get me wrong, I have been a scoundrel and I can still behave like an enormous ass hole but, essentially, I do not believe the world and I think it’s important to not believe the world.

What do I believe in?

I believe in doing what’s right and I believe that unless you believe in doing what’s right, you will never do what’s right and never find out how wrong you were. That’s me. What I think is right, now, isn’t the same as what I thought 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It’s not completely different, the essence is still the same. The essence of Justice, the essence of being a sovereign human before being part of a community, the essence of knowing yourself before judging others, the essence that we are all connected, no matter what and like ocean tides, we move and are filtered together, whether we agree with each other or not. We all move together.

I have some decisions to make. They’re the hardest decisions of my life and the most important, they are not new, maybe repackaged, but not new and they have always been with me to make and I have, for the most part, turned my back on them in favor or what I thought was the easier path of least resistence. This is not easy to accept. I’ve created a structure of my life, dependant on my avoidance of these decisions but I’ve neglected my own structure, stunted it, held it from being strong, while building a house of cards.

Fortunately, in some ways, I haven’t completely ignored my own structure and strength. The world gives you opportunities for strength and I have taken some of those. I have also held values and supported them in the face of a world that is also a house of cards, thus building other strength. But overall – I have not been tested and overall I have failed other tests and overall my own, personal failure, has spread like a contagion and touched all who touch me and all who touch them and out from there.

That is how it works. Nothing is isolated, nothing is alone. If you build strength for yourself, you build it for the world. If you let go for weakness, you let go for the world and inspire weakness.

This is why the world is the way it is today.

I do not want to continue to fail to be who I believe I am and who I believe I can be. I do not like the way that sits with me anymore and my 50 years have given me the gift of hindsight to banish my delusions that there is any thing or person who is responsible for my life before I am.

I am responsible for my life. I am responsible for being exactly where I am this second. I am responsible, only me.