Starting Over 2018

The start of a new year is a good time to examine where you are in life. To take stock and determine what is good, what needs to be changed, added, or removed.

I have neglected my backyard for a couple of years now. I was working on my own business, overcoming a sense of failure and grief when that business had failed in 2016 after several years of promise. The past year (2017) was spent just earning a living and wondering what to do. The garden plots I had set up and tended have gone to weeds. The flower garden, and bench I had built around a trellis I had constructed rotted away and became over run with weeds. The trellis was blown over during hurricane Irma. The starfruit tree, pineapple and papaya are overgrown, choked with weeds and neglected. Other projects are still waiting to be completed.

Not all is bad. The shed has a new roof. The grass is kept cut. The debris from hurricane Irma have been cleaned up, or chopped up for firewood. The fire pit is in good working order and used at least once a week.

My backyard makes a good metaphor for life.

It may seem like there is a lot to do. Maybe in your life, you feel overwhelmed, that you want to give up, or that you should just accept things as they are. Wait. Step back. Allow yourself to relax, breathe. Accept things are as they are at this point but resist the urge to see your situation as irreversible, that there is no way out.

Your see how things are, envision how you would like your life to be in a year, five years, ten years. Lock that away in your heart, establish your dream. Dream big. It will require effort on your part, you might experience pain, disappointment and discouragement but if you keep moving toward your dream, you will make progress.

Expect it, your dream will be tested. Your own fear may cause you to question your ability, your worthiness. Your friends and family may discourage you, other obstacles in your culture, or community may challenge your dream. It is your dream, fight for it.

The hard part is overcoming your own fear or apathy and just getting started. It is so easy to find things that get in the way. Start with something small, easy. Find something you can repair, start, experience that will give you an easy victory and start you on your way. I will not say that the more progress you make the easier the journey will become. In some ways it will. As you experience each success, the next goal will appear more obtainable.

When you examine what you have experienced during this past year, no matter how neglected, overgrown and choked with weeds a part of your life appears, remember to examine it closely, you just might find it has borne fruit after all. That fruit might be wisdom, a skill, a relationship. Find it, learn from it, and cherish it. Use it to inspire your next steps.

A neglected backyard is a metaphor for life but it falls short in some ways. I am not a self-help guru, just an older, middle-aged guy who has experienced life and is still making an effort to learn, better myself, and raise my family.

I have started working on my backyard. I have an overall goal, career-wise I want to work toward and have taken the first steps toward achieving it. I want to share at least a part of my journey with the hope I can inspire you to start and continue in yours. As I do so, I would like to share some thoughts about relationships.

Most of the motivational speakers I have read and watched focus on a single aspect of life, expressed as heart, mind and body. I feel that this presents a limited scope, focused only on self. Our experiences and the path to our goals can be better expressed as concentric and overlapping sets of relationships not just with self (heart mind and body) but with self, others, and the universe.

I would like to share these ideas, and some tutorials around programming, and cryptocurrency and possibly even on life-hacking as lessons for my own children and a means to better the lives of many other people. I know those topics seem very random and disassociated at this time. To my own eyes it looks presumptuous to think I can inspire and help others who do not know me or have any relationship to me. I also know that is fear talking. I am taking the first step here.

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