Reading harold_maude's journal

In search of personal excellence.

That was and still is the goal that I keep reaching for.
That's what happens when a person embarks on a personal search for who they are.
People can say anything about you and to you and convince you that they know you better than you could ever possiblly know yourself.

People can believe anything about you and convince you that they know what they are talking about.

But unless you set out to find out who you are, you will find out things about yourself durring very difficult circumstances.

You may believe what you've been told, but the truth will show up and show you, you.
It's very dependable that way.

It seems to go easier on a person when they purpose to set out to find out the truth about themselves. Who they really are deep down inside.
Somethings we know, but pretend we don't around other people.
Our reaction to someone having a problem with us gives us some clues.

Most people take great offense to confrontation concering someone else's opinion of them.
The more truth you know about you, the less angry it seems to make you.
If you are hungry for truth, it will light your way.
You might want to run from what you see, but you will stay because you want the truth.

In the eyes through which we see our journey, everything becomes something we are noticing, simply because we are searching for clues.

Clues are alot like puzzle peices. We have no definable picture
to work from, only the notion that the truth is in there somewhere and we won't stop until we see the whole picture.

That's what sojorning has taught me.

I have learned to love truth no matter how much pain it brings to the surface.
Pain has it's own lessons. And they are part of the process as well.
Sometimes truth brings death to things that delay the process.
That takes acceptance that it is for the best.

To be the best, to be the strongest, to be who you are ment to be. All of these things take breaking everything about you.
So that out of the broken places, the light of truth will shine through.
I call that the grinder. Because that's what it feels like somedays.

Some places are more like brick walls. You are stopped dead in your tracks. And the same lesson comes again. If you make the same choice, you end up slamming into the brick wall again.
This process keeps repeating until you figure out that making a different choice is a better idea. It doesn't hurt so much.

I was thinking about the job I go to monday through friday.
A food service job. It's somewhere down on the food chain near the bottom of things.
It's not a job that you would look for when planning your life out.
But it's still ok if your going to college and need some money when you go back to school.
Most of our asperations have more to do with money than who we are ment to be.

It does have the bennefit to it that if you move somewhere new you can always find a job in food service to get you started.

Other than that it has no bennefits to it. At least on the surface it doesn't.
But what if you start thinking about it this way:
This is an opportunity for self discipline.
This is an opportunity to see how good you can be,or how fast you can move.
Something very similar to the diciplines that surround martial arts.

It's a place where you can learn to rise above the expectations and the gossip and the attitudes and lack of dependablity that is a common plague in food service jobs.

Doing this doesn't mean that you have to think of this lowly place as a life time thing.
It's just a different approach to doing something that very few people want to do, but end up doing over and over.
When you look at things this way, maybe the reason that some people never do anything but food service or any other lowly job again and again is because they keep hitting the brick wall, because what they are suppose to be learning they arn't.
So they have to keep doing it, no other doors ever seem to open for them.

Something to think about the next time you think about going to work and start complaining.
Why not choose to have the best day you've had in a while and see how the day goes.
You may have so many things thrown at you the first few times you decide to do this, and what this is doing is showing you things that need to be delt with inside you.

I'm finding the more times I make the decision to have a good day, the less exausted I am at the end of the day.
No matter what gets slammed my way, my purpose is to have a good day, so I have to just relax and let it slide past me.

There alot more good days now than difficult ones now.
Funny thing is about this, there has been so much stuff happen for the last few months that I now need to make the decision to have the best day I can just to get through stuff in one peice.

The truth that I have found in choosing to discipline myself in an area of my life is that it makes it alot easier to wake up with me in the morning.
And that's worth it.
If nothing else good comes from it, that alone is worth everything.
To be able to wake up not wishing I could unzip my skin so I could get away from me because I don't like what I'm being like or living like.

I still have a long road to go. But it gets easier to want the truth to do what it does. The end results are awesome.
That's what makes it worth all you go through too.

I hope someday when all is said and done that it will be said of my life, that I lived it well.

This post was edited by harold_maude on Mar 01, 2008.

OMG, Harold_Maude is back!!! How many years has it been? Welcome back... =)

Haha, look who else is back. Now, if RCD, Martin and a few other guys get homesick it'll be just like in the good old times!

"God is dead." - Nietzsche, 1882 "Nietzsche is dead." - God, 1900

It seems like we are all comming home. It's good. Hey, this place is like home. Can I take my shoes off now?

We all came to this place looking for something very different than what else is out there, and found a magical place called net alive, far from the maddening crowds. We have loved this place and sometimes not loved it so much, but kept comming back.
It's the first place I came looking for when we finally got the net last week. Long journey to get back here.
I do hope that Martin and others who have been a part of this place and have for one reason or another left, or put this place on pause, but I have hope that they too will find their way back to this great house that welcomes all who come looking for what isn't there anywhere else.

I don't know if I ever thanked you for building this place, I'm assuming your the one who had this great idea and turned it into a place that feels like home, thank you.

Maybe I should just get some bunnie slippers and a quilt to wrap up in. The weather here has been unmericfully cold. I keep looking for polar bears.

I'm beginning to think that spring will not show up till next year, and I want to plant a garden. Organic tomatoes...ahhh the sweet treat from the garden!

Ya....hi. :) I finally made it back through the mists of the dark moon. :)

I'm happy to see that you are still here. Consider your self hugged hello!

The wandering are returning. Neither mud, no half open cans of something that has been sitting in the frige for months becomming a science experiement, nor godzilla can stop the wandering from returning. (strange sense of humor has come with me)
I'm so happy to see you. :)

It's been about 2 1/2 years.

I gotta get to work, be back after then.

Hugs!

wendy