small miracles.

October 10, 2005

October 9, 2005

Right now it’s 11:10pm, I just took a swig of diet snapple, and I just stared at the Goals I wrote on June 20th, posted right above my computer. It was Fleet Week this past weekend and I got a glimpse of the Air Show with my good friend, Matthew Sundstrom, from the Cliffhouse in Outer Sunset.

It’s amazing how so many thoughts run through my brain in a single minute: Today I recall watching the fighter jet planes disappear behind the Golden Gate Bridge and then getting distracted by a Seagull (which I mistakened as a jet plane) land on the large rocks located near the edge of the sea where I also noticed a small rainbow appear everytime the waves descended upon the beach. All of a sudden, in the midst of the moment, I began to see miracles. I perceived a beautiful array of colors appear and disappear in milli-seconds…I witnessed animals soar across the sky with flawless beauty and agility…I sensed the warmth of the beaming sun hit the skin of my back…I could feel Life penetrating through me. I felt the miracles of the world around me absorb the miracle of my existence.

It was the conscious acknowledgement of the small miracles I witnessed today that helped me not only overcome fear from an insecure childhood, but also helped me build courage from my thoughts on an unpredictable future.
Like the trees in the forest and the seagulls in the sky…We were all Designed for a Purpose.

And almost like the miraculous rainbow that appears for a brief period in time……..so will we.

We will only exist for a small period in time…and in this time, many design a life that is built around denying our fragile existence: our mortality. We consume money, materials, insurance and ‘beauty’…we feed our insecurities every time we lose our personal power to control ourselves….but in reality, instead of ‘controlling’ our physical environment, we begin allowing our physical environment to ‘control’ us. We allow our fears to consume our psyche…

I know this because in the past, while I felt like I ‘controlled’ my body because of my intake of food, when I became too ‘controlling’ I began ‘losing control.’ I allowed food to dictate whether I went out to dinner with friends, celebrated holidays, or how long I ran around the track. In the beginning, my internal success of achieving set fitness goals personified my personal happiness, however, when I exhausted my efforts in achieving a ‘high’ every time I set a new fitness goal and achieved it….the pendulum inside me became imbalanced….and I slowly began to fall. While I felt like I was controlling food, it was food that began controlling me. I overcame my private battle by understanding this balance between what I had control over and what I didn’t. Matthew termed my battled as ‘controlled stupidity’….I guess we all get pretty stupid when we try to control things that are outside our realm of domination. But while it seems like it could have been controlled in retrospect, in reality…you can’t control anything if you aren’t consciously aware of the loss of power that is transitioning between you and the physical object.

You will observe that most people in life are controlled by something in their physical environment….People begin to ‘Measure’ their happiness in terms of how much money they make, how much stuff they own, how many friends they have….for a brief period, my happiness was measured by how much food I ate and how much I weighed. But that’s all a false sense of control…acquiring all that ‘stuff’ catered to a false sense of Perceived Power….
This doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve real control…if you truly want real control you have to possess Authentic Power….and Authentic Power only manifests itself through True Discipline –

……if you can Discipline your mind, and positively monitor the dynamic material that runs through your mind, you begin to own your thoughts. By owning your thoughts you begin owning your actions and more importantly, you begin owning your dreams. Today I pray that we all fortify the Mental Might to seize our Mind- because then you will have achieved REAL POWER…for you will then have full occupation over the one thing that you really possess…which is YOU.