H O P E

A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. If you have air in your lungs and blood in your veins you have hope. Hope is what drives the human mind to move forward in life. When faced with a rather grim situation, hope is that agent that brings positivity to it, making us believe that things HAVE to get better. Hope is ALL we have, without it we have no reason… we have nothing. Humans have a limited time on this planet and we have to make the best of what we have and look to the positives in our lives. We do not know what tomorrow holds, but we hope that whatever is in store for us will be favorable. Hope is making the best of what you have, so that you can have a better outcome for tomorrow. When life gives you lemons, you make a lemon drop and plant the seeds so you can get more lemons in the future. ;)  ... It takes YEARS for a lemon tree to begin to produce lemons ...  hope is the same way. You should never give up on the tree because you do not know when that tree will bless you with the fruits of your labor (hard work)... When you have hope you should never lose it because once it pays off it will be all the more fulfilling.

Hope can be difficult to hold on to when all things seem lost. When people go through depression or a traumatic experience, it may seem that there is no way you can recover from it. However, somewhere in the back of one’s mind we have to believe that things will change for the better. BELIEVING that you will overcome the obstacle is half the battle. Once you have the mindset that things will get better, they HAVE to. If you hit rock bottom, there is nowhere else to go but up. Having hope will allow you to see beyond your current predicament into the future. One’s mind set can be the difference between one’s failure and one’s success, when you think you cannot do something chances are you will not reach that goal. When you reach this crossroads say to yourself, “Try, try again, and NEVER say ‘I can’t.”  Simply saying these words to yourself will affect your mentality toward the situation. It will make all the difference in your outcome and stops you from throwing in the towel.

Who remembers all of the controversy surrounding the Winter Solstice of 2012? The end to the Maya Calendar, or in other words the end of the WORLD? How many of us stopped our lives because we were betting on the fact that we were going to die? The Maya Calendar ended and some INTELLIGENT people took this as the world was going to end … but the majority of us, “normal” people still went about our lives and prepared for our futures. … we had hope. Granted not everyone believed that the world was going to end, but if everyone had, things would have been very different. Had we lost that hope, everyone's lives would have been in chaos, no one would have prepared for the day after. What we hope for tomorrow determines what our actions will be today. During this event I was finishing up my LAST semester at university, had I believed the world was going to end, I would not have bothered to get my education. However I had hope that the world was not going to end, as a result I secured my future by earning my degree.

We do not know what our future holds, and when we begin to think about our future we make a choice about how to pursue that life path. We think about what career will make us feel fulfilled. Once we begin to pursue that career path we hope that it works out for us. The reason we form ideas and construct dreams is because we have hope. We hope that they will one day come true, and that the future will be better than the present moment. There are no simple roads to success and when we hit a brick wall we look to the power of HOPE to see us through that rough patch. Without having hope, we would give up LONG before reaching or even realizing our potential. Some say babies are a blank slates and we learn basic things in life from walking to learning, and how to communicate, but if we gave up every time we fell no one would know how to walk. Throughout our life we WILL fall down, and having hope is what helps us get back up. If you fall 6 times you HAVE to get up 7 times, those 6 falls do not matter, it is the seventh rise that matters the most! Don’t nobody wanna stay down!   

Even when we hope with every fiber of our being, there will be times where all of our hope will be for nothing, and disappointment settles in where that hope once stood. That disappointment is not the “end,” but it is an opportunity to LEARN. We are not perfect human beings, there are many things that are in our control and if we have made the wrong decisions it is up to us to learn from our actions. Hope keeps us motivated, and it give us a reason for living. Our very existence is not based on a promise, but it is based on having hope for tomorrow and living for the future.

~Dream. HOPE. Future.

It’s About: TIME

There are 365 days in a year, that is 8760 hours, or 525,600 minutes, or 31,536,000 seconds… in whatever terms you wish to think of it. How will you spend that time? Time is a valuable concept, once it is gone you can NEVER get it back, you have to make the best of it while you can. Many people, including myself, take time for granted. We put things off until tomorrow, but why put things off when they can be conquered today? We do not realize how valuable time is until it has run out. Lets face it, we are all going to die one day and we do not know when, so lets make the best of it. We all get busy in our lives because we have schedules that we need to keep and we lose sight of what matters most, we forget how to LIVE! With the schedules that we keep we become creatures of habit. We develop a routine and with each passing day breaking that routine becomes harder. We need to step away from our schedules once in a while to create new experiences and spend time with the people we love and care about. Time is not a promise, you do not know how much you actually have. So don’t waste it and do not waste that of others’. Life is too short to be wasted by sitting on your a$$ for too long, get up and go DO something! After all we are only here for a short time.

Cut the crap! Start doing what you want to do life is too short to be making excuses all the time. You have to live the experiences you want to have, because before you know it your window of opportunity will be nailed shut. New responsibilities will arise and doing things on a whim will be much harder. Responsibilities and excuses are not the same, responsibilities are the things in life that you HAVE to do and have no control over whereas excuses are things you intentionally put in your way. We cannot run from time nor can we run from our responsibilities, but we can make the most of it. Why sit idle when there is something more fulfilling that you could be doing? Where there is a will there is a way, all of those excuses will no longer matter and will fade away.

When we give people our time, we are giving them a part of ourselves that we will never get back. When there is a friend in need or we decide to go to a family gathering we are saying that those people are worth a portion of our life, we are willing to give up that time for these people. I always feel grateful when someone takes time out of their day to simply say, “hello,” because they do not HAVE to but it lets me know that I am worth the time and effort. However, there have been many moments in my life where I have felt that MY time has not been valued by others. There was one incident where I was waiting for someone for about an hour. There was not a single text message, or a mere phone call to let me know they were running late. Once the person did show up, I was astonished to see that they did not even show a single thread of remorse about wasting my valuable time. My time did not matter to them, the only thing that mattered to them was themselves and THEIR own time. I was angry beyond words and I realized that if I was not worth this person’s time, why should I bother wasting more time on this person? From that day forward, I limit my interactions with this person and do not rely on them for anything, because they simply do not value me. Remember, when someone takes their time out for you they do not have to, they do not owe you anything. I can only hope that the person who took my time for granted learns from what happened, because I learned that I cannot rely on them.

The only thing we have is time, but we never have enough simply because we are spending our lives doing things we do not want to do. The power of choice is an amazing thing. We can choose to do what we want with our time, so why not CHOOSE to do what makes us happy and fulfilled and count our blessings for the people in our lives? As Benjamin Franklin said, “Lost time is never found again.” Use your time doing what makes you happy, and spend your time with people that matter and show those people they matter.

~Value time.

When You Point One Finger, There are Always Three Pointing Back!

Play the victim, go ahead, try it. When you point a finger at others, you are too busy concerning yourself with the flaws of others, when you have flaws of your own. You gain nothing from blaming others, you are just trying to shift the blame to someone else. Don’t blame your issues on others, there are so many things that we as individuals can improve on, we should not have time to worry about what is going on with someone else. That constant, “they did this to me,” or “I am like this because..” will not help anyone. No one became rich by crying about how poor they were. There comes a point where you have to stop pitying yourself, and expecting pity from others. No one is perfect, we all make mistakes, but you can choose to be the victim and cry, or you can rise above your issues and make the best of the situation. There have been so many times when I have wanted to give up and be the victim because it felt like everyone and everything was working against me. Playing the victim is not beneficial to anyone, it would not have gotten me anywhere. You could sit in the corner and wait for your knight in shining armor to come and save you, or you can make your own armor and save yourself.

We all love a good “underdog” story, because the underdog makes their own armor. These stories give us hope and faith; that we too can make it, and that the world is not that bad. Those “underdog” stories would never happen if the underdog was focusing too much on what’s wrong in their life. You can either focus on all the things going wrong or you can look to what can be done better to overcome all the negatives in your life. Playing the victim only works for a little while. What are you going to do when everyone can see right through that? It may work the first few times, but eventually people will stop responding to your call, just like The Boy Who Cried Wolf. When that time comes you are going to have to get your isht together and pave your own way. No one else can deal with YOUR problems other than you. When you point one finger at someone, what are the other three saying to you? They are asking YOU, what YOU are going to do about it? You have enough energy to blame another, now what’s your plan to do better?

Be independent, do not let what has happened to you in the past define who you are and dictate your future. All you can do is focus on being the best version of yourself, and overcome the obstacles in your path. Wasting your time focusing on negative energy is pointless, it will not get you anywhere. You have to learn not to fixate on the negative and take responsibility for your own situation. So the next time you find yourself pointing the finger, look at the many things that you could do to transform that situation into a fruitful experience. Don’t blame others for something that you have the ability to fix.