M.J. Blehart's Blog, page 10

You Can Choose Your Own Life

Choosing and deciding is how you have any control at all.Photo by Jan Genge on Unsplash

Unless you’ve been asleep for years, or locked away in a cave, or hiding out on a tropical island somewhere, you know shit has gotten weirder. Reason and logic seem to be increasingly out to lunch. Greed, ambition, and screwing over others to advance yourself seem to be all the rage.

Many, many people feel as if they are being wronged by “others”. There’s a great deal of false narratives claiming that “those people” are why certain ways of life are dying out, why certain types of jobs are fading away, and all sorts of other societal matters causing people distress both real and imagined.

It is incredibly disturbing, distracting, and uncomfortable. Absolutely unnecessary divisions are being torn wider and wider apart, usually by people who profit from false conflict and competition. Why not orchestrate it when it’s not naturally occurring?

It’s easy to feel lost, sad, scared, uncertain, angry, hopeless, and the like. A whole lot of unnecessary suffering might be on the way, and there is little to nothing most of us can do about it.

Yet no matter what’s going on in the world outside of you, you can choose your own life. Who, what, where, how, and why you are can be chosen by you.

This might look like a lie. Admittedly, there might be certain restrictions around money, jobs, children, others you must care for, and the like. Yet when it comes to your life, so long as you are alive you have choices and decisions available to you.

Everything is an inside job

Among the many false narratives, one especially pervasive one is that you need outside help or assistance to get anything done. Even many of the supposedly self-made business and political leaders of the world got seed money or connections from a parent or teacher, took credit for the work of others on their staff, or otherwise were helped to get where they are.

I’m not entirely poo-pooing outside assistance. The only way to learn something new is via outside help. A teacher, guru, book, friend, and the like can show you a new or different way from what you already know.

However, the only way you choose your own life is when you make the choices and decisions to do so. I can’t make any choices or decisions for you. Sure, I can make suggestions, cajole and coerce you to my way of thinking – but you alone choose and decide.

When you get right down to it, you are who, what, where, how, and why you are because of choices and decisions that you’ve made. Yes, you’re also who, what, where, how, and why you are because of choices and decisions that you didn’t make. But that was yet another choice and/or decision on your part.

Everything about your life, when all is said and done, comes from within you. That’s because nobody but you is in your head, heart, and soul. Nobody else can think your thoughts, feel your feelings, and take actions or not for you. Only you have the power to do that.

Choices and decisions are made by you both consciously and subconsciously. In either case, it’s always an inside job.

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on UnsplashYou choose your own life mindfully or mindlessly

Everyone is of three minds. Unconscious, subconscious, and conscious.

The unconscious mind is fully automated and directs how your lungs breathe, heart beats, neurons fire, and so on.

The subconscious mind is semi-automated. This is where your beliefs, values, habits, and memories live. The subconscious mind is like a sponge, absorbing everything it’s exposed to without filters. Without filters, you can find yourself lost and seemingly out of control.

The conscious mind functions here and now. It’s not automated, and it’s engaged by specific external and internal factors. The external factors are your senses – smell, taste, touch, sight, sound, instinct. Your internal factors are your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approaches, and actions.

The external is how you, in your body, engage with the world around you. The internal is how you process it. Working with these is how you become consciously aware.

Awareness is within and without. Yet the focus of education, advertising, media, and the like is so heavily on the external that the internal is often left flailing in the wind like one of those air-powered advertising dummies on a roadside.

Did you know that every single choice and decision that you make comes from within you? Sure, it might be influenced by people, places, and things outside of you – but it all still originates within you.

That’s why and how you ultimately choose your own life.

Choose your own adventure with kindness, compassion, and empathy

You can choose your own life, no matter who, what, where, how, and/or why you are, presently. But beware of the false narratives of selfishness.

You and I live in a world among 8 billion other people. All 8,000,000,000 of us have different desires, dreams, ambitions, goals, and internal motivations. Some might align, some might be similar, but no two people are alike.

It’s not selfish to choose your own life. Each and every person on Earth can choose your own life. That should not, however, disregard others.

I’m not talking about the assholes trying to deny the rights and freedoms of other people on spurious bullshit. If you’ve read this far, you’re not one of them, and likely live largely removed from them. Yet you still interact with other people directly in your life. This is where applied kindness, compassion, and empathy matter.

Everybody everywhere wants to receive kindness, compassion, and empathy. Especially those who consider kindness, compassion, and empathy to be weak. Them most of all.

You can’t make choices or decisions for anyone but yourself. Active conscious awareness – mindfulness – is where you begin. The recognition and acknowledgment of this is a first step toward changing the collective consciousness and moving away from this fear-based society to a more reason-based one.

You begin with yourself. You start with your own choices and decisions for who, what, where, how, and why you are. Then you choose your own life. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. Worthwhile? Absolutely.

What choices and decisions with you consciously make today?

This is the six-hundred-eighty-second (682) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.

The post You Can Choose Your Own Life appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Empathy is Not the Same as Sympathy

The world needs more empathy, not more sympathy.Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

I write a lot about how kindness, compassion, and empathy are desired by everyone, everywhere. In fact, there is not a person on the entire planet who doesn’t desire these.

It occurred to me that people often mistake empathy and sympathy. This is a hugely important distinction to make because empathy serves to make connection where sympathy creates disparity.

The difference is simple. Empathy involves recognizing, connecting, sharing, and striving for understanding. Whether this is thought, feeling, experience, situation, or what have you – the idea is that to empathize is to relate, to find and/or create understanding and a sense of being as if you can be in that other person’s shoes.

Sympathy, on the other hand, involves recognizing what the other person is thinking, feeling, or experiencing, but it’s unconnected. You aren’t making any effort to share, understand, or gain a sense of being in the other person’s shoes. It’s just to sympathize and make them feel seen. No connection is made. Frankly, this is superficial.

That’s why empathy empowers and sympathy doesn’t. Yet because these are mistaken and conflated as often as they are, I want to dive deeper into recognizing and understanding this and why that matters to and for you and me.

Why does empowerment matter?

One of the biggest issues in society today is how much happens to create disempowerment. The entire playbook of too many politicians, business leaders, and the like is disempowerment.

What does that even mean? It means they want you hopeless, helpless, and/or incapable. These so-called leaders want you to be a cog in the machine, accepting any shit sandwich they feed you and then thanking them for it and asking for seconds.

Don’t believe me? Explain health insurance in the United States to me? You must be insured but they can deny your claims and then send you into bankruptcy still sick and broken. You are not even empowered to take care of your health on any level.

Empowerment is your ability to take control over your life experience. Admittedly, there are a very limited number of things that you can and do control, but they are incredibly important. Why? Because you alone live in your head, heart, and soul.

The only person who can think, feel, intend, choose approach, and act for you is you. Others can guide you, suggest paths for you, offer assistance, or make threats or promises to get you to choose this, that, or the other thing. In the end, however, the choice is and can only be made by you.

Disempowerment is action that intends to make you feel like you have few to no choices, like there is only One True Way, and that you are the Universe’s plaything. If you accept this to be true, then it tends to be. However, you’re empowered to make most choices and decisions for your life.

Where does empathy come into this?

Empathy is sharing understanding as if it’s your own

Sympathy is usually given with no connection and no understanding. That person over there is clearly suffering and you feel badly for them – that’s sympathy. That’s all sympathy is.

Empathy goes deeper. That person over there is clearly suffering and you ask why. Rather than just feel bad for them you, seek to understand what is causing their predicament. Then, when you can think and feel it with an eye for what it must be like for them, you can empathize.

How is that empowering? Because understanding on any level is always empowering. The more empowered you are the more capable you become of flexing your choice and decision muscles to choose and decide more things for your life experience.

These aren’t necessarily big things. They might seem small and insignificant, but that doesn’t mean they are. For example, if the increasingly distressing matters coming out of Meta are troubling you, you can choose to reduce how much time you spend there – or leave entirely.

For example, after Elon Musk bought Twitter and allowed Trump and his hate back onto it, I left it behind. And I don’t miss it in the least. That might look like a small choice, but it’s done wonders for my mental and emotional health.

Empathy helps you conceptualize what someone else is thinking and feeling. This creates understanding and connection. That opens you to not just better understanding others but making more connections to you own thoughts and feelings.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on UnsplashKnowing what you are thinking and feeling

One of the biggest issues the ongoing work to disempower the masses causes is a lack of self-knowledge. There is no place where anyone teaches you how to know yourself unless you land in therapy or seek it out on your own.

School teaches you how to learn, then how to be a cog in the machine. Parents teach you how to be a contributing part of society and not be a dick (hopefully). Jobs teach you how to work as a cog in the machine. Nowhere in any social situation does anyone teach you active conscious awareness, mindfulness, and how to know what you’re thinking and what and how you’re feeling,

Abstractly, you know. Everyone does. But right here, right now, at this moment, unless you inquire you either vaguely half-know or don’t know. Yet the key to self-sufficiency and self-awareness is, ultimately, mindfulness.

Mindfulness begins with knowing your own thoughts and feelings. From there, you can also become consciously aware of greater abstracts like your intentions, and if your approach to any given matter is from a place of positivity or negativity. All of these, combined, open you to choices and decisions for informed, intentional actions.

Intentional actions are empowering. That’s because they’re conscious choices to do things with and for your life.

Sympathy doesn’t empower by not making any useful connection. What’s more, it doesn’t do anything for the person you give it to or to you. Empathy, however, connects on multiple levels. Giving empathy also draws more to you, which then connects you inside and outside with more kindness and compassion, too.

Recognizing how sympathy and empathy differ isn’t hard

It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.

When you recognize and acknowledge that sympathy makes no connections and empowers nobody, you can consider if it’s worth your time and energy to give it. Knowing that empathy makes connections and empowers, you can use it – in combination with kindness and compassion – to make better connections both within and without.

This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.

Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. From that broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you for their empowerment.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the five-hundred-and-seventieth (570) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published fiction and non-fiction.

The post Empathy is Not the Same as Sympathy appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Your Reaction To Any Given Situation is Your Choice

Maybe not initially, but after that it is.Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Like it or not, shit happens. And there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it.

When shit happens, you’ll react to it. This always comes in three stages.

The first stage is your visceral, immediate, automated reaction. What that will look like is situational, dependent on factors including what, where, how, why, and when, and often unpredictable. This can include immediate rage, anger, frustration, joy, surprise, excitement, or interesting combinations of multiple of these. The first reaction just is, simply happens, and that’s that.

The second stage is immediately after that reflexive reaction. The shit has gone done, you reacted to it, and now you decide if that reaction is how you proceed, or if you will shunt it away and choose something else, or some combination therein, and what that looks like for you. This is where instinctual negative reactions turn into anger, fear, sorrow, and the like, and continue to keep you on a negative approach (or possibly excitement, elation, surprise, and the like, and continue to keep you on a positive approach).

Whatever it is, following that first stage of the initial automated reaction, you choose the next. Continue in negativity or seek and/or create positivity.

The third stage comes later. This is when you’re well past the shit that happened, your initial reaction, and what you followed that up with. It is here that you look back and might find trauma, a place where you shifted your life perspective, regret, or other matter that impacted you long after the shit that happened. From here, however, you can learn lessons and apply them going forward.

After the initial instinctive reaction, your reaction to any given situation is your choice.

Real-life case studies

These things happened to me. One is quite a long way back. The other is all too recent. Both involve shit happening, although what that amounts to and the rest are subjective.

When I was 6 or so years old my parents divorced. I don’t know what my initial, visceral reaction was because I don’t remember how or when they told me what was going on. What I do know is what I did in the second stage, and how this would impact for a long time my interpersonal relationships, my irrational fears, and numerous other aspects of my life.

Fortunately, thanks to the third stage, I’ve been able to analyze this and learn from it all. I took what I learned, applied it to new situations and happenings, and used everything I gained mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to approach current things differently.

Which brings me to the recent shit. Buy a house, they said. It’s a great investment, they said. You’ll be glad you did. Okay, so we did. Despite various hurdles since we did this, I don’t regret that we chose to do this. Yet I often rue and lament aspects of it.

I had plans for our home, that my wife shared, that I very much looked forward to. We got the ball rolling to make them happen. Then, just the other day, we were told they can’t be done.

The reason is unimportant, but while my initial, visceral reaction was to go into a rage, I didn’t. I felt it, I wanted to give in to it but chose not to. Instead, I’m channeling that sensation to find alternatives and find an alternate way to get the thing we desire for our home done.

Hence, I chose my reaction.

Photo by Christopher Ryan on UnsplashYour reaction to any given situation is your choice

In the first stage, this is not the truth. But the first stage is instantaneous and outside of conscious control. After that, however, the choice is wholly yours.

I could have taken that rage and screamed at the person informing me that we couldn’t realize our plan, swept everything off my desks and flipped tables, or gone on a rampage of some kind. My initial, reflexive reaction was this.

Instead, I took a few deep breaths, refocused, and gave thought to alternatives. Okay, fine, another fuck you from the Universe. Shit happens. I can get all stressed out about this and lose my shit, or I can go on with my day and seek an alternative solution to this problem.

No, it is in no way, shape, or form resolved. Truth is, I haven’t anything beyond a vague idea of how to proceed from here. However, I feel fueled by that initial rage to take action and do something to get a resolution.

Hence, I can definitively state that your reaction to any given situation is a choice. Admittedly, what that is and how it will play out will vary. Yet it’s always the option and there’s always potential and possibility.

How do you find and/or create your choice? Via mindfulness.

Mindfulness that this is your choice

Because that initial, visceral, first-stage reaction is automated and subconscious, it’s easy to believe you have no control or choices at all. While that’s true of the initial instinct, after that you have choices.

Let that visceral reaction dictate what happens next? Or choose something else? I could have raged, but what would that have gained me? It would have led to making myself unhappy, telling off and/or insulting someone who was simply the messenger, and additional negative feelings.

After the subconscious automated reaction, you get to choose if you allow that to continue or work with conscious awareness. Conscious awareness is a product of the now that only works in the present. When you choose to employ that, however, you become mindful and gain control of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions.

Ergo, your choice for how to proceed when shit happens. Good or bad, desired or unwanted, your reaction to any given situation is your choice to make. Analyzing your conscious awareness and how your subconscious interacts with it is how you choose what stage two and stage three of your reaction looks like after shit happens.

It might seem easier to remain subconscious, but that’s not empowering or, frankly, worthy of you. You deserve to control what’s yours, and that includes your choice of reaction to any given situation.

Can you see how this works and why and how it empowers you?

This is the six-hundred-eighty-first (681) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.

The post Your Reaction To Any Given Situation is Your Choice appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Be Who You Need

You’re more powerful and capable than you realize.Photo by Andrey K on Unsplash

Human beings are social creatures. Even the most introverted people still need people (just fewer, more specific people).

How you need people in your life is extremely variable. Sometimes it’s simply about knowing someone is there in some way. Other times, you need someone to shoot the shit with. Sometimes you need reassurance, validation, encouragement, or some other external recognition/acknowledgment. Still other times, you need literal assistance from another person.

Lots of different things will impact how, why, where, when, and even if you need people. Overall, this is impossible to determine because it just is and simply will be. Everything about needing people is uncertain, unpredictable, and full of unknowns.

This can be infuriating. Yet there is a truth to who you need that you can always, at any time, work on.

Be who you need.

You have more power than you realize

Who are you? Many people treat this as a literal question because of beliefs, values, internal and external expectations, and other factors. The answer, however, is always the same.

Who are you? You are you. You’re the only you that ever was, ever is, and ever shall be. That’s not to say you are unchanging – you’re always changing because change is the one and only constant in the Universe. Yet even when you change, you’re still you.

Where you are, how you are, what you do, how you think, what and how you feel, intentions, actions, and approaches, always change. They might have echoes and similarities along the way, but they’re not the same. You, however, are always you.

The matter that most of us fail to grasp is that that’s enough. Unfortunately, society, advertising, and the expectations of others near and far, all make this feel like a lie. They imply or outright tell you that you need to be better, stronger, faster, wiser, more attractive, richer, thinner, and on and on. You’re set up to never be enough.

That, however, is total bullshit. You are enough. In fact, you’re more than enough.

Many people will tell you that various limitations are your reality. Socioeconomics, gender, race, nationality, education, class, and other constructs limit who, what, where, how, and why you can be. That. Is. A. Lie. You are not so limited.

One way to see this and begin to move past it is to be who you need.

Be who you need

No matter the circumstance that causes you to need someone, some elements never change. For example, you always need who you need to be kind, compassionate, and empathetic. Even someone giving you tough love is doing so (I hope) out of kindness, compassion, and empathy.

The best way to get these is to give them. However, lots of things are making this increasingly challenging these days.

When your so-called leaders are bitter, cruel, self-righteous, and lacking in kindness, compassion, and empathy, this creates a false narrative about what it takes to win. To succeed you must be equally as hard and harsh.

This is a lie. That harshness, cruelty, and other negativity is not sustainable. That’s why they keep doubling down and adding layers – because they can’t be sustained from that. Nothing and nobody can be.

What you need, what everyone needs, is kindness, compassion, and empathy. The best way to get that is to give it. In other words, be who you need.

Photo by Floris Van Cauwelaert on UnsplashBeware false equivalencies

It is in no way, shape, or form a weakness to be kind, compassionate, and empathetic. Yet more and more the narrative is that this is too soft, too vulnerable, too easy to get walked all over.

Is it? No. The false narrative claims it is. But it’s not. Even the least kind person desires kindness, they’re just blinded by their own selfishness, narcissism, and the like.

Nobody needs cruelty, hate, or harshness. Nobody. How is it that anyone thinks being awake and aware (woke) is negative? Nobody wants to be asleep at the switch and under the control of anyone else. They just have been led to believe that most of the competition between individuals they’re shown – and the lack and scarcity that come with it – is true. But it’s not. Nearly all the ways you’re supposedly in competition with others are not at all true. Most of what is supposedly in short supply is actually abundant.

“They” are not out to get you. Nobody is actively trying to take what’s yours (except many of those claiming some “other” is your competition).

Do you know anyone who doesn’t desire kindness, compassion, and empathy? I don’t.

Hence, when you be who you need, you open yourself to potential, possibility, and abundance. Because you’re not in competition with anyone else, you can be who you need without hindrance or judgment. That doesn’t mean you won’t be judged or hindered by others, but you can get out of your own way.

This is not easy. But being your genuine, true self rarely is. Since that’s the only person you can be, be who you need to give what you desire to get in life from both yourself and others.

To be who you need isn’t hard

It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.

When you recognize and acknowledge that everyone everywhere desires kindness, compassion, and empathy, you can give more to yourself and others. Knowing that the idea that this and other notions of being “woke” are untrue, you can start from here to find and create more potential, possibilities, and abundance for yourself and others and you can be who you need from there.

This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.

Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. From that broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you for their empowerment.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the five-hundred-and-sixty-ninth (569) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published fiction and non-fiction.

The post Be Who You Need appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

New Year To Start Anew – Or Not

It’s okay not to change anything with the new year.Photo by Massimo Sartirana on Unsplash

Today is the day after yesterday and the day before tomorrow. It also just so happens to be the first day of a new year according to the Gregorian Calendar.

One of the enduring ideas of the new year is to make some sort of resolution. A quick search showed that New Year’s Resolutions date back thousands of years.

What exactly is a resolution? A resolution is defined as an adamant decision to do or not do something. Hence, with the new year, people resolve to do things they’ve longed to do for a while like quit smoking, stop eating sugar, go to the gym, journal daily, quit swearing, stand up hourly during work, and on and on.

Personally, I find resolutions impotent. Why? Because you can resolve all day long to do anything and everything you can think of. But that’s not the same as taking action. This blog began due to my first New Year’s Action, in 2012, to write a weekly blog post – thirteen years and counting.

The new year represents a shift, a reinterpretation of time featuring a restart. Lots of people like to use this as the impetus to change and start anew. That’s why New Year’s Resolutions are so pervasive.

However, despite the pressure to make changes or do new things, that choice is up to you. It’s okay not to change anything with the new year.

Change is the only constant

New Year’s Day, the day after yesterday, or the day before tomorrow, there is a newness inherent in it. Every day represents a chance to make a new start, have a new experience, do something different, and so on.

For most people, the new day is specifically their waking hours. For me, that’s from about 6am to 11pm (give or take half an hour). If you work a night shift, that might be 2pm to 8am. Whatever your waking hours might be, your mileage may vary.

No matter the case, the time you’re awake is your new day. Even when today is not much different from the day before, or the day before that – it still is. It’s not just about days of the week, months of the year, and so on. What it’s about is change being the one and only constant in the Universe.

Hence, even if it’s mostly similar, today has changed from yesterday. Tomorrow will also be different because of change.

This might be imperceptible. Often, change is so slow and small that it goes mostly unnoticed. Many a sudden change turns out to be a slow change only just noticed and recognized/acknowledged.

Most change is beyond your control. Shit happens, good and bad things occur, and it just is. When it comes to your life, however, you can control elements of change by making active, mindful choices and decisions.

Or not. It’s okay not to choose to start anew or change anything with the new year.

Photo by Bret Kavanaugh on UnsplashStart anew or not

I, for one, am mostly happy with my life right now.

There are some minor bits I’d like to change, but nothing big or major that I feel I need to address with the new year. I don’t need to start anew.

What I will do is work on some of my existing goals. I have specific goals that I strive to reach from Monday to Friday. These daily goals include:

Editing (1-2 chapters, book or audiobook)Writing 1500 words of fiction (blogs don’t count here)Meditating (5 minutes minimum, usually 20 minutes daily)Journaling (writing in a physical book to collect my daily thoughts)Exercise (taking a walk, fencing, hitting the gym, etc)Affirmations (cheesy, maybe, but they’re empowering)Water (I strive to drink at least 8 12oz glasses of water a day)

I track this on a whiteboard calendar in my office and recently went over the past year of doing this to see how I did. My best was making my goal 90% of the time (editing).

The two I most need to improve on are writing (made that goal 36% of the time) and doing my affirmations (made that goal 67% of the time). Then journaling and meditating (made both of those goals 78% of the time). No need to start anew or change anything drastic, just to be more diligent and mindful.

Hence, I’m not making any resolution or taking any specific action for the new year. I will take what I’ve learned and strive for better diligence in meeting my goals.

It’s okay not to change anything or start something anew

If, like me, you’re mostly happy with your life right now – go with that. Keep doing what you’re doing.

There is, however, an elephant in the room I should address here. Many things point to the world at large going mad. Between Trump getting reelected, the war in Ukraine, the Israeli/Palestinian insanity, climate change, and the like, it sure feels like minding your own happiness, wellness, and wellbeing is selfish.

The truth is – it’s not. Caring for yourself, maintaining your health, wellness, wellbeing, contentment, and even your happiness isn’t selfish. The primary reason for this being true is that you can do more for the world when you are in a better place mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

True selfishness involves a lack of kindness, compassion, and empathy via intentional action you know will cause harm. This isn’t dumping someone due to a toxic relationship and knowing they will feel hurt – that’s not selfish. This is knowingly denying rights, taking more than your fair share, and otherwise inflicting hurt and/or harm on another and not giving a shit about it.

Self-care is not selfish. When you are in a better place, you’re better equipped to help others. How will vary. This, like starting anew or not, is another choice and decision only you can make – or not.

Today is the first day of the new year AND the day after yesterday/day before tomorrow. You can do something or nothing with that. It’s okay to change and not to change anything with the new year.

Happy New Year. How are you approaching the day today?

This is the six-hundred-eightieth (680) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

The post New Year To Start Anew – Or Not appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Don’t Let Them Win By Making You Negative

Find and/or create positivity in the face of ongoing insanity.Photo by Malachi Cowie on Unsplash

One of the most distressing things about 2024 coming to an end is what we can expect in 2025. Specifically, the incoming US administration and all the bullshit, fear, and uncertainty they’re bringing to the table.

Even those who gave their support to this insanity are uncertain what it will mean. This is making it increasingly easy to be fearful, distressed, and negative.

There is no telling what will happen. Nobody can predict with any certainty how this will all go down. If you accept that it’s all going to be awful, that everything will suck, and that all the worst-case scenarios will come true, you might as well give up. That’s what soaking in that negativity amounts to.

I am not, in any way, shape, or form, suggesting ignoring what’s happening. There will, without a doubt, be some awful, horrific, terrible shit to come. That, however, is always true in any and every situation. Shit happens. Bad things occur. Life sucks from time to time.

Toxic positivity is all about ignoring this. That’s why toxic positivity is toxic. You can’t just ignore the bad, scary, and negative – because they are, have been, and always will be.

Yet allowing the negative to dominate, to rule your head, heart, soul, and conscious mind, is a choice. When you allow negativity to be your state of mind you allow them to win.

Don’t let them win by making you negative.

You are still here. We are still here

Right now, a lot of people are feeling disheartened. For reasons most reasonable people can’t make heads or tales of, the politicians with naught but messages of hate, discord, and lots of lies won the election in November. Both haters and people who will suffer at their hands (by their policies and plans) voted them in, making the rest of us scratch our heads in perplexity.

It felt like a major loss. How did it come to this? What happens now?

I don’t know. Frankly, nobody knows. Yes, a lot of bad things are possible here. It’s depressing, upsetting and really freaky. However, they might have won this round – but history is not on their side.

Oppressors always meet their end. Always. For the few true believers in the haters, the rest are willfully giving away their power literally and figuratively. You, however, are still here. The fight isn’t over because you’re still here.

And you know what? You are not alone. It might feel that way, it might feel as if you’re taking on the world right now. This is especially true if you’re a woman, a person of color, LGBTQA+, or otherwise marginalized. Yet you are not alone, you have allies, and we are all still here.

They will do their best to silence you, to get you to retreat in fear. They love to call us names and create ludicrous false equivalencies (like how in the hell is “woke” bad? Especially when the opposite would be asleep at the switch and/or unaware?)

You are still here. We are still here. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to give up.

You have a choice. More than one choice, in fact. So, don’t let them win by making you negative.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on UnsplashDon’t let them win by making you negative

I am not suggesting in any way, shape, or form, that you ignore, disregard, or avoid what they present as their “truths”. What I am suggesting is being mindful of how that makes you feel and choosing what that looks like.

Yes, much of what has happened and might happen going forward will cause anger, uncertainty, fear, and other negatives. You will feel bad because that’s part of life – you feel bad sometimes. But you get to choose if negativity is the dominant emotion, thought process, intent, and approach that you utilize and experience.

You can choose to take that negativity and turn it into positivity. Take that anger and organize a protest. Run for office or support someone doing so who will be better. Donate to the good and worthy causes. Do something constructive and productive by channeling that negativity into empowerment and make something of it.

Empowerment comes from within, not from without. Hence, the negativity they use to win disempowers you. Yet you can change it because you, and only you, live in your body, head, heart, and soul. Thus, you alone control all of what begins in you.

What you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, your intentions, if your approach is positive or negative, and your actions are yours to control. Initial reactions tend to be involuntary, and that’s why negative things make you feel bad. That’s valid. Yet, after the initial visceral reaction you can choose what comes next.

Hence, you can choose to not let them win by making you negative. Active conscious awareness – mindfulness – empowers you. That shows you how you have options and can take those negative experiences and make something positive out of them.

It’s not easy – but it’s worth it.

Not letting them win by making you negative isn’t hard

It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.

When you recognize and acknowledge that shit happens, and it’s both normal and okay to feel negativity, allow it rather than resist it. Knowing that the initial reaction of negativity is involuntary and situationally normal, you can use mindfulness to make choices and decisions to take the negativity and make something positive of it, use it to power your imagination, and be a force for good, change, potential, possibility, and hope.

This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.

Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you for their empowerment.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the five-hundred-and-sixty-eighth (568) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

The post Don’t Let Them Win By Making You Negative appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Thank You For Being Here

Thank you for being you.Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

The holidays are a mixed bag. For some, this is a happy, joyful, amazing time. But for others, it’s a sad, unhappy, awful time. Your mileage may vary.

I can relate to the discomfort many experience this time of year. As a child, I grew up as a non-Christian minority (my family is Jewish) in a very Lutheran area. Coupled with that, I was also the only one who had divorced parents, one of whom lived halfway across the country.

Then, because that wasn’t entertaining enough, when I got severely injured in 1999, I spent the month of December in a rehab hospital. The nurses’ station had a radio on all the time, and it only tuned into one channel – so I was bombarded by never-ending Christmas music.

This year has been additionally rough because it is the first year my wife and her family are without her mother. Suffice it to say, the holiday spirit is proving elusive for everyone.

This can cause you to feel ostracized, disconnected, and like you are somehow wrong. All the messages say you’re supposed to be happy and connected and more. So what if you aren’t?

It’s okay to not be okay. You’re allowed to be unhappy, to feel disconnected, to not be in the spirit of the season.

Still, that doesn’t help when society makes you feel bad about yourself. And don’t even get me started on current politics and that quagmire.

Taking all this into consideration, I’d like to empathize with you.

It’s okay not to be into it all

It drives me nuts that Christmas decorations, music, and other elements of the holiday have started appearing earlier and earlier. I get it, some of you are super into this. But for real, can we at least finish Halloween and maybe get within a week of Thanksgiving in the US before everything turns into Christmas?

For every person who loves this, I knew 3-5 who are not fans. There is a lot of pressure to get into it, to accept it into your heart, to be into it with every fiber of your being.

If you are not a Christian this is just another day. And even if you are, really, today is just another day. If you celebrate and love it, I’m happy for you. Please, enjoy! But many can’t and don’t, for all sorts of reasons.

Whatever the case, it’s okay not to be into it all. Have no holiday spirit, no fucks to give, nothing speaking to you about this time of year? That’s okay. You are not a bad person because it’s okay to not be into it all.

Still, that can feel like a lie because it’s not the message dominating the world. What can you do about that?

Let’s create another message. One that is more inclusive, comes with no strings attached, no expectations, and no obligations. You can simply relish it and let it be something or nothing.

Here is the message I desire to put out there.

Thank you for being herePhoto by Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash

Many people find this time of year the hardest time of year to feel good, connected, or like they should even be here. Yet just because you’re not into it, it might not be your thing, or circumstances have taken your fucks away, you matter. Who you are, what you feel, how you feel, and everything that makes you, you, is just as worthwhile today as it is any other day of the year.

That’s why my message to you is – thank you for being here. Thank you for being you. Even if I don’t know you personally, or you’re reading this randomly and have no clue who I am, I still, genuinely, thank you for being here.

Your light, your energy, and your being, all make this world a better place. Even if that feels like a lie, like it’s a crock of shit, it’s still true. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for being you

It is not easy to be. No matter who you are, where you come from, or what your experiences have been, life is not always easy. Everyone faces challenges, everyone experiences loss and pain. What that looks like and how it impacts you is utterly variable. Yet it’s not something only you can, do, and will experience. EVERYONE can, does, and will.

Despite that, I want to thank you for being you. Again, even if I don’t know you, I’m grateful to and for you. Thank you for being here and being you. I appreciate you reading these words, and I hope that good or bad, this gratitude I give with an open heart energizes you positively.

You are worthy and deserving of all the kindness, compassion, and empathy. If today has meaning for you or not, thank you for being here, and thank you for being you.

I believe this is a message everyone can get behind. It’s my hope that this message of kindness, compassion, and empathy sustains and empowers you.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being you.

This is the six-hundred-seventy-ninth (679) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

The post Thank You For Being Here appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

Asking for Help Does NOT Make You Weak

The power and positivity of kindness, compassion, and empathyPhoto by Isi Parente on Unsplash

It can be difficult to ask for help.

This is especially challenging now when so many forces equate asking for help as a weakness, unbecoming, and something to be avoided.

That’s simply not true.

Asking for help does NOT make you weak. What it does is make you open to receive kindness, compassion, and empathy.

I don’t care who you are or what your circumstances might be. You have an innate desire to receive kindness, compassion, and empathy.

Yet these are also being equated with weakness. Look at the leaders recently elected who regularly shit on kindness, compassion, and empathy – and still win elections.

Kindness, compassion, and empathy are not weak. The truth is that it’s not weak to ask for help and give or receive kindness, compassion, or empathy, in any way.

Everyone needs help from time to time

Nobody can live their entire life without receiving help along the way. Nobody.

That’s partially because the human experience involves interaction and cooperation between people. It’s partially because we are social creatures. In part, it’s because a great many things you seek to do in life require a minimum of 2 people helping one another in some way or other.

Are you reading this? Congrats, you are helping me help people seek, find, and employ more positivity, conscious reality creation, and mindfulness in their daily lives. Does what you read here make you think? Then I am helping you gain new perspectives or focus on existing ones in a different way.

Help can be tangible or intangible. Many heavy, awkward packages require 2 or more people to lift. Don’t know a word you read in that research paper? A dictionary helps you understand it. Not sure what that person is doing there? Asking questions helps you gain understanding.

Nobody goes without needing help along the way. Asking for help is not a weakness, in fact it’s a strength. Why? Because like kindness, compassion, and empathy, the inherent give and take of helping is empowering.

Asking for help empowers you

Despite notions to the contrary, asking for help is empowering. Why? Because it opens you up to receive data that can positively impact your life.

Further, it creates a channel to give and receive kindness, compassion, and empathy. Getting help gets you solutions to things. It also creates communications that can do wonders for the world.

Think about it. If more people were encouraged to ask for help, especially intangible help around understanding things, they’d be more empowered. Instead, they’re discouraged from asking for help and encouraged to blindly accept all sorts of surreal things.

What’s more, not asking for help keeps you small and fearful. Every message you see that tells you that asking for help makes you weak places that idea into your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind lacks filters to ask important questions such as “Is this true?” or “Is this applicable to me?”

Look at all the ways certain business leaders and politicians strive to make you and I believe that they, and they alone, can fix this, that, or the other thing. When you don’t ask for help – and accept false ideas of creating weakness – this starts to become easier to believe because your unfiltered subconscious mind buys it hook, line, and sinker.

Photo by Lukas Juhas on UnsplashKindness, compassion, and empathy empower

Asking for help might make you vulnerable, but not weak. Sure, you admit you can’t do something/don’t know something when you need help – but nobody can do or know everything. NOBODY.

Ergo, everybody needs, fundamentally, to ask for help sometimes. More often than not it’s for a simple matter. But every time you ask for help you open channels for kindness, compassion, and empathy. That empowers you.

The narrative that kindness, compassion, and empathy are a sign of weakness is utter and total bullshit. Look at Trump. He is a huge proponent of this and shows it with his threats, anger, cruelty, uncompassionate and unempathetic ways. Yet he demands that you and I treat him and his pals with kindness, compassion, and empathy.

This variant of kindness, compassion, and empathy is attached to limitations, provisos, and conditions that are completely counter to the abundance inherent in kindness, compassion, and empathy. They are abundant in the Universe because they’re intangibles. There is more than enough to go around, and giving them – like asking for help – doesn’t make you weak. It empowers you.

When you get help, you’re more open to give help. Doing so in small ways channels greater positivity and empowers more people. When more people are empowered, they become more capable of choosing better for themselves. You gain more control of the elements of your life experience that you can control.

Hence, it does not make you weak.

Recognizing that asking for help doesn’t make you weak isn’t hard

It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.

When you recognize and acknowledge that asking for help is a natural, necessary part of the human condition – and not a sign of weakness – you can ask for help more easily. Knowing that asking for help channels kindness, compassion, and empathy, you can use this to freely gain greater understanding of yourself and the world around you, which opens you to greater understanding, and seeing more potential and possibilities in the world.

This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.

Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you for their empowerment.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the five-hundred-and-sixty-seventh (567) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

The post Asking for Help Does NOT Make You Weak appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

You Choose How You Approach the Unknown

This is a necessary element of mindfulness.Photo by Olena Zolotukhina on Unsplash

The year is coming to a close. A lot has happened in the world, and much of what’s occurred has created a surreal amount of the unknown.

A great deal of the unknown we’re facing is scary. Certain people about to take power are expected to abuse it, and there is no telling how that will impact people like you and me. All I know is that the unknown is hugely, massively uncertain right now.

What can you and I do about this? Did you vote in the elections? Will you actively do things to protect the marginalized, the disenfranchised, and those with increasingly silenced voices? When it comes to the big picture, that’s more or less all that you can do.

So, what about in your daily life? This is where you get to choose how you approach the unknown. Approach is an utter intangible, but wholly necessary part of mindfulness.

How does it work? Before I get into that, allow me to drop a few truths here.

Potentially uncomfortable truths

These are important because they tend to be misunderstood. What’s more, they command a lot of focus and attention despite being largely untouchable.

For starters, you can do jack shit about the big-picture issues. All that stuff on the news – the economy, the incoming administration in the US, the Israeli/Palestinian horrors, the war in Ukraine – you can do nothing about it.

Apart from the aforementioned voting and acts to protect those being threatened (like attending protests, giving money to worthwhile charities, and so on), you can do nothing for the big picture. That’s disconcerting – but the truth.

What about zooming in and looking at the people around you? You can hold conversations, discuss things, and make plans, but you have ZERO control over the people around you. There’s nothing you can do to control them, their beliefs, values, habits, actions, and so on. Sure, you can help influence and sway them to your arguments, but you cannot control them or predict what they will and won’t do.

There’s nothing you can do about the big picture. You have no control over anyone or anything outside of yourself. This feels hugely limiting and also adds to the sensation of uncertainty and facing the unknown.

This is where mindfulness comes into play.

Photo by Robert Hrovat on UnsplashYou get to choose how you approach the unknown

The following are the things over which you can exert real, direct control. This is not everything, but all of it is in your power to control.

ThoughtsFeelingsIntentionsActionsApproach

Each of these is utterly yours to control via active conscious awareness. Mindfulness of your conscious self.

Remember, your mind is divided into 3 parts. The Unconscious mind is how your heart beats, blood flows, nerves fire, and general breathing occurs. The Subconscious mind is where your beliefs, values, habits, and memories all live. Your Conscious mind is where – here and now – you access your six senses to read these words, hear noises in your environment, smell, taste, sense, and touch the physical world around you.

When you engage your conscious mind, you become actively aware of who, what, where, how, and why you are. Beyond the physical and your six senses, you have thoughts, feelings, intentions, approaches, and actions.

Most of these are self-explanatory. Thought is your idea/understanding/consideration of a thing. Feeling is what and how you experience it. Intent is the why behind choices and decisions you make. Action is what you do.

Approach is the angle from which you work with things. Do you come at problems directly or indirectly? Are you heading towards this, that, or the other thing from a positive or negative mindset?

When you face the unknown, you choose to approach it from a place of “this is going to suck” or “this is going to rock” or even a less specific, fatalistic “this is going to happen.” Choosing your angle of approach is likely going to impact the outcome.

Approach and optimism, pessimism, and realism

Though it’s much easier to consider approach from a place of positivity, negativity, or neutrality, this is where broader concepts often come in. Optimism, pessimism, and realism all play into approach.

Optimism is positive. Pessimism is negative. Realism can be neutral but tends to get colored in positivity or negativity.

However you approach things, there is never One True Way. Likewise, perfection is in the eye of the beholder. Ergo, even with the most positive, optimistic approach, shit happens.

Choosing the angle of your approach is part of mindfulness and active conscious awareness. If you choose to come at the unknown from a place of fear, pessimism, and negativity, it’s most likely that poorly is how it will turn out. Conversely, if you choose to come at the unknown from a place of hope, optimism, and positivity, you are setting yourself up to experience the potential and possibilities in the unknown.

Approach is a choice and a decision you make. You can’t ignore the negative or pretend that bad things don’t exist because that’s not how anything in the Universe works.

How you choose to approach the unknown determines the energy you bring to it. That informs you if you are doing what you can to take control – or – allowing the unknown to make decisions you will have no choice but to react to. The choice is yours.

How do you choose and decide to approach the unknown?

This is the six-hundred-seventy-eighth (678) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.

The post You Choose How You Approach the Unknown appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.

You Choose Your People

You get to choose who you give pieces of your head, heart, and soul to.Photo by Felix Rostig on Unsplash

There isn’t a damned thing you can do about “them.”

Them? Those people. The ones making all the surreal, ludicrous choices. Those people who deny science, believe lies, and accept things as true that aren’t. You can’t do anything about them.

This is deeply disheartening. On the one hand, you probably want to believe that people are inherently good. I know that I do. But, on the other hand, you keep being shown proof that people are selfish, willfully ignorant, and easily misled.

There’s a great line in the movie Men in Black that magnificently accounts for this.

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

The collective consciousness of the world is fear-based. This is why people become dumb, panicky, dangerous animals the moment shit goes down or things go off the rails.

When you are fed a constant diet of fear, scarcity, insufficiency, and other false narratives about what the status quo must be, you can start to see why people fall for shysters, tricksters, and the like.

Spending your time and energy trying to reach them, to get through to them, to change their hearts and minds does nothing but deplete you and your energy. There’s not a damned thing you can do about them.

You can, however, choose your people.

Who are your people?

There are four classes of people in everyone’s lives. They are, from the furthest out to the nearest, as follows:

Celebrities, politicians, them. There are the people constantly in the news, who we see more often than not from very, very far away. They’re known, they exist, but you likely have never met or will ever meet them. Ultimately, the nameless, faceless them.

Authorities, heads of big companies you work for, bureaucrats, them. If you work for Amazon or Merck or the like, this is management. Cops, firefighters, soldiers. Anyone working at the DMV or like agency. You might meet them in passing but they are still abstract, largely a nameless, faceless them.

Teachers, religious leaders, coworkers, distant relatives. Chances are that you interact with these people. You might even consider some mentors or friends. But they are still “them” because you likely didn’t choose them (school, church, work environment, and so on). Despite regular contact and interaction, they are not your people because you didn’t fully choose them. So, them, as such.

Parents, siblings, friends, chosen family. You don’t just interact with these people abstractly. They hold pieces of your heart and soul. You know them and think of them as part of a greater “us”. You can talk to them about a wide range of personal and interpersonal matters. You choose these people to connect with, making them “us” in your head, heart, and soul.

Important caveat – Parents and siblings sometimes become “them” if you stop having common ground. Society tells you this is not acceptable, but giving pieces of your head, heart, and soul away is a choice, and you can choose not to give to those who hurt you if they cause you pain.

Photo by Helena Lopes on UnsplashYou choose your people

The truth is that you get to choose who you give your heart to. This isn’t about romantic love it’s about connection. Affection. Kindness, compassion, caring, and empathy for one another.

This is why – despite some arguments to the contrary – parents and siblings sometimes cease to be your people. When they cannot return kindness, compassion, caring, or empathy, you have every right to move on. Why give your time and energy to someone who either doesn’t give a shit about you or who causes you only pain – whether emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, or any combo of these.

When all is said and done you get to choose your people. When you mindfully choose you open yourself to better, more balanced mental health. Why? Because you decide who to give your head, heart, and soul to versus who not to waste your energy on.

When you do this some will call it selfish. And I get that. I want to change the world for the better and convince “them” to stop falling for the bullshit, to stop harming those who are different, to care more, etc. But, since I can’t, choosing my people is a better use of my energy.

The thing is, it takes small steps to build big. If you create a core of people who care, and are empathetic, kind, and compassionate, chances are that’s not just among yourselves. Together, you radiate it out beyond you. Together, you and your people create examples others can see and emulate. That empowers you, and empowerment begets empowerment.

When you mindfully choose your people, you’re consciously and actively caring for your health, wellness, and wellbeing. This isn’t a trial or a challenge, frankly, it’s a privilege. Please use this to your advantage and choose mindfully.

Recognizing that you can choose your people for your greater good isn’t hard

It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.

When you recognize and acknowledge that there are 4 kinds of people in the world as you know it, and only one is those you can choose to be with, you can take the time and make an effort to choose your people over choosing to give time and energy to “them”. Knowing that you can do nothing about “them” but can make choices and decisions to be with people who share pieces of your head, heart, and soul, you can mindfully act on this to better your life here and now.

This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.

Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you for their empowerment.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the five-hundred-and-sixty-sixth (566) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.

The post You Choose Your People appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.