Are you too comfortable to be scared?

Our lives are directed by the many small choices that we make that will largely affect our futures. Lives lived or lives wasted, these crossroads force us to pick a way to the next objective. Sometimes this objective is positive and at times during the countdown to our eventual next life, the negatives seem to expand exponentially.
What we chose to do to grow or shrink should be more closely scrutinized. Because you are maintaining, this does not diminish the opportunity for drastic catastrophe. A wiser, older person once told me that she works out and eats right not to avoid death, but to avoid the turmoil that an excruciatingly painful death could cause her loved ones. Her exact quote was, “Trennan, this is not about living or dying, it is about avoidable suffering!” She believed that God was in control of HIS part and she needed to get some control over hers. This was quite a revelation to a 27 year old youngster who assumed he knew it all. I had no idea I was a mere 3 years from figuring out I knew NOTHING.

Fear can be an extremely great motivating factor in being all that you are meant to be. I have always had a health fear of God, my father, and failing to continue after a failure itself. I now know that there is growth in each failure. I also know that many more people have failed than the number of those that have tried.

Clouding and masking this healthy fear, quite often, is comfort. There are so many people that are so comfortable that they are not afraid. They find comfort in their situation, their health, their education, their finances, their relationships etc. to be afraid. I am never so comfortable with my wife that I sit in front of the television and pop back beer and expand my girth. You see I know that she wants to see something that is pleasing to her senses. I know she loves me regardless, but I love her enough to not get too comfortable. We still date, we still wrestle, and we still travel. I take nothing that she has helped me to become for granted.

You see I am too scared to ever become to comfortable. I watch people eat like they have no idea that they are killing themselves. I watch people so comfortable that they never consider how these small decisions affect those they leave behind. I watch people abuse their comfort into situations that render them unable to reverse negatives and continue on cobblestoned roads of undoing. I watch physical inactivity turn into decay of the mind and limbs.

Fear can be an awfully strong point of origin for invention. It can make you become what you never ever perceived. Comfort can be something to aspire to but be mindful that it can create a monster of paralysis. If you are too comfort to fear what you should fear get it together!!

Balance is the secret to a peaceful life

Balance is the secret to a peaceful life. Not too much and not too little will suffice. Many lives are lived in a tumultuous manner because people are not aware of “enough”. Enough time doing what, enough resources, enough spirituality, enough candor, enough leisure, enough work, enough of someone else. There must be a point where your cup runneth over.

In adulthood there are pressures that can overwhelm the most astute among us. We can all be overcome with just plainly “too much”. Everyone has a breaking point. That breaking point is usually achieved over a period of time that may cause the water to either boil or dissolve. This will depend on your state of being in life at the moment. There must be lucid moments that can help you concentrate on your harmony, your symmetry, your steadfastness, in another word….your precious balance. You have to know when too much has been handed to you. You have to also know how to give the extra burden away and to whom to give the extra burden to. The last sentence was VERY important! I do know that we all don’t believe the same but you must know where your help comes from.

You have to seek that help or, if spirituality is not for you, find a way to relieve yourself of said burden, IF POSSIBLE! Some burdens are yours alone and there is usually a reason that you have been chosen to carry this responsibility. Many people are too serious with the weight of the world on their shoulders. They fail to realize that there are 6,814,800,000 of us with an annual increase of 1.8% each year. Surely some of us can help you with the tremendous weight on your shoulders. You only have to be willing to share the burden.

Life is a blink of an eye and should be enjoyed to the fullest. There must be a time and a place for all things. How would you know that you are in good time if you have no idea what bad times are? How do you know that there is a God if you have never been made to call his name? How do you know that victory is sweet unless the sour taste of defeat has been on your lips? How do you know he is a Prince if you have kissed no frogs?

Love but let go, dance to the bad music too, smile at an enemy, listen although you have heard it already, pose foolishly when no one is looking, and learn even though you are smart. Be the one to recognize that it is over. Recognize when you need to stop pushing “your” God on to others. Be willing to be of service to others, even when you may miss the festivities.

There must be time to relax, worship, love, be stupid, watch low-brow television, scream loudly, do something you probably don’t want anyone to know about. Run a marathon or walk it just because others think you can't. Find time to work out, physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually! Don’t wait until you are 50 to start living that catch up life. IT AINT THAT SERIOUS! Most of our complications come from our own minds but someone else’s thoughts. Figure out what really balances your life. Go for it and love every moment. Find your Yang…Ying!

Unconditional Love - Yeah right!

I am The eternal optimist. I believe the human race is essentially good. I believe that people mean good by me and really want to see me avoid harm. I know that we are born in sin and taught to do right; we just ignore our lessons sometimes. A child with no rearing will more often than not do the wrong things. Right is something of a learned behavior that is nurtured and not natural, but something we really want to live by. I am optimistic in this to a fault. I maybe even naïve.

I believe that most parents love their children unconditionally, I said MOST. I say this because some parents love their children little and some love their children not at all. This parent/child dynamic is, in my opinion, the only unconditional love these children will experience between themselves and another human in their entire lives. Let me state it clearly: A parent’s love is the only love that will be unconditional. This is if you are lucky enough to have a parent who first loves you.
Understand that all other love in your life will come with at least one condition and most of the times multiple conditions. Parents are gluttons for punishment in this way because their unconditional love will not allow them to “wash their hands” of some of you that should be left to your own conscious devices, habitual acts, heinous activities, and downright stupidity and ignorance. Even though this is in you, your parents love never diminishes. Your parents will still profess their love for you when Texas is wheeling you in by gurney to answer for the murders of many including your relatives and even an attempt on that parent’s life. Google Bart Whitaker to see just one example of this unconditional love.

Others will profess to love you unconditionally but they lie. A spouse will love you until you cheat enough, kill a loved one, spend their life savings, and a whole host of other misdeeds. This love is not unconditional. You cannot just apologize to a spouse for ANYTHING. There is a line in each marriage that is to not be crossed, I promise. Cross this line and the love turns to hate and disgust. The same is true of relatives, friends, and others that profess to love you unconditionally. There is a line to their loving you and you will reap the punishment and drought of their particular love when this line is jumped.

This conditional love even exists in your children. They love their parents as long as they are useful and doing their bidding. Many of us carry this conditional love for our parents into our adult lives. Many of us think that we love them unconditionally until it is time to change their soiled diapers. Watch the way they treat Big Mama! This is not everyone. If it is you-check yourself. If the good lord blesses you, you too will be Big Mama or Big Daddy one day. I am just thankful that this is not true of all children.

No other human being will love you unconditionally through all of your stink, mess, ugliness, candor, stupidity, foolishness, mistakes, misjudgments, falsehoods, crimes, lies, etc. Everyone else will cut you off and “wipe their hands of you” except your parents.

The next time someone tells you that they love you unconditionally; you don’t have to challenge them. You just need to know that they are not your parents and they have a line that you should not cross. This line that should not be crossed exist with your parents also, it’s just that they are really too in love with you to not give you a million chances.

This is what happened to the American Black Men!!

Destitute of moral caution, the 60’s was an experiment in retarding a race of people via free love, sex and rampant drug use. The counterculture of this time was not the gravy train it is historically mentioned to be. A generation of African-American youth, especially males, was negatively impacted by the libertine attitudes that dominated this era in time.

Those left to suffer were the offspring of those chemically and/or politically enlightened masses. You see this generation dropped the ball in the rearing of the next generation of black males in America. This is the generation that walked away from their sons either because they were too high to accept responsibility or too sober to accept what they created in drunken or drug-enduced stupors.

This generation left a generation of grown boys in the 80’s that lacked fatherly direction and perpetuated the single mother homes of that generation. The 80’s black males lacked that father in the home and that got worse in the 90’s and is getting worse each coming generation. They dropped the ball! The men that were to raise us were busy trying to run from the responsibilities that their fathers embraced. It was a time of counter reality and consequences be damned. I don’t know that the African race of people in America ever recovered.

It has led to boys living in men’s bodies, gangs acting as father figures, a lack of moral compass, and no strong work ethic, angry black males that hate themselves as fathers because they had none and least of all a deprivation in the respect that we should be bombarding on our queens. They left a generation of sister slim pickings to choose from. I am truly sorry Sister and apologize profusely, since they won’t. They at least owe you that. This generation is why you have such a hard time finding a mate.

They dropped the ball in their selfish, cruel, and childlike behavior. They played in the playpen until it started to look raggedy, and then they moved on. They are still moving on. Most of them are now into the 60’s and approaching seventy. They turned out the generation of boys that had children in the 70’s and 80’s. These offspring are menaces to their societies without fathers that didn’t learn to be fathers because they had none.

Shame on you if you know that I am speaking of you old man!……………Horror on the rest of us, especially black women.