I have come to find that as I experience and witness things over time, the more cynical I become. I understand that this may be a result of being negative and not focusing on the positive. Also it may be a result of self full filling prophecy; such as, being negative ends up producing negative results.
I have spent some time writing off all the bad things that happened to me in an effort to search for the good. I was hoping that maybe I could start to isolate the good, take note of it, and start to realize that things are not as bad as they seem. Unfortunately, my efforts to find the good, in some substantial sense to offset the bad, were fruitless. I did not really find anything happening in my life to offset the bad things that I witnessed or experienced.
I can have some control over the things I encounter and I am starting to think that my attitude plays a major role in the outcome of most things. It is possible that for one to establish balance in their life they must also change their attitude, this is a hard thing to do but I am quite certain it is possible. It is hard to ignore our past and experiences in order to function as a positive person culturally speaking. But it is a necessary but insufficient condition in order to try and establish balance in your perception of the world.
Some say that in order to be happy and see the good is to understand who you are and come to terms with it. Understand that you are human and you are unique. You will never be perfect and understand that no matter how hard you try you can't be perfect. You are human and inherently flawed and so is everyone else. Some of us appear to be more flawed than others but that is only because we are supposed to fit into the guidelines for which our culture sets for us. If the qualities and traits that we are born with make it difficult for use to accept and agree to these guidelines we are considered to be more substantially flawed than the average person. The fact is if we were not put into this restrictive framework we would all equally be different in our own ways and no one could really place judgement on another as to what traits about you would be a positive feature or a negative flaw.
Basically what I am getting at is be happy with who you are. I know without question that everyone does know who they are. People tend to say and even think they have trouble with their identity. I feel that most people just want to shape what others think of them or change who they are such that they fit in better and give people the impression that they want them to have. The problem is not knowing who you are, it's a matter of not denying who you are and being comfortable with that.
We are all different and no one person is better than another. For those of us who think otherwise I would have to say that they have a need to think they are better than someone in order to establish some feeling of self worth. That is fine if that what works for them as long as they don't try to bring other people down in the process of doing so. Ok well that is my rant for the day. This quote I am going to post somewhat is related to what I have said here. It has to do with self image and innocence that one once had in an earlier time when they had not experienced adversity on the scale at which may have changed their perspective, this type of experience is generally like a one way valve, you can go in but you can't get out, forever scarred.
The confusion only seems to grow with time. Direction is lost within the maze of life, and the light seems to be sucked into an abyss, never to be seen again. People only stay for small pockets of time before moving on to more important things. So the question arises, do you keep moving forward into the madness, stop and risk missing out, or go back to times you think were more comfortable only to find that they have changed while you were gone?
-Lisa M.
