Tagged: adventure

Storytime Saturday, featuring an excerpt from A Million Little Boxes – a work story. 

I decided that I’d refuse to let a building define me. I’d refuse to allow any company, or entity, or job, or anything define who I was as a person. As a human. As a man. The contents of that building did not define my success. My success was not in there. It’s in here. It’s within my chest. Within this soul. I am defined by who I am, and what I do…what I believe and what I feel…what I’m capable of…not by the whim of some fucking corporation. Interestingly, it was brought to my attention that I may be afraid to move forward, that I feared success more than I feared failure. The thought of that shit had me up in arms, like “what?” You’ve got to be kidding me, right? “All I want is success”, I’d tell myself.  But you know what?  Maybe I was.  

SnowPorn.

This space is screaming my name.  Solitude? Check.  Mind blowing, forested landscape?  You’d better believe it.  Snow?  Mountains of the gorgeous stuff.  This little abode right here, with its wonderfully minimal facade, is the quintessential retreat from the hustle bustle of the workaday world.  How incredible would it be to unwind, unload, and decompress amid all of that beauty?  

Light your fire, grab your coffee (or wine), snag your book…and cozy up to the warmth of this week’s great wintry space.

Poems – Failure is OK.

Hey, we’ve all been there, right?  We’ve all failed at something…me, you, and everybody else…and we will most certainly fail at something yet to come.  It happens; that’s just life.  And you know what?  It’s ok!  So when we do, it’s important to alter our perspectives and accept it.  Just….accept it, fix what we can, learn from it, and move on.  Acceptance and courage can turn failure into a learning experience that we can use to grow beyond our limitations.  Think about it.  
Thanks for reading, and best of days to you all!

Poems – Vision. 

I am a huge dreamer.  I try to also be a huge doer.  It is a challenge to find that balance, since it’s often much easier to do the dreaming than it is finding the time and mojo to DO.  The two (hopefully) go hand in hand, as dreams are nothing but fairy tales without action.  As such, I am a huge advocate for dreaming and doing.  A major advocate for living life rather than just existing.  My poems are not meant to be preachy, “this is how you should live your life” style poems, but rather reminders of things that I think about.  Things that I have noticed in my own experiences and in my own walk of life.  I don’t pretend to have any answers at all.  But I’ll tell you what, the quest for those answers is fun…and it is my joy to write about those explorations.  In that vein, feel free to check out today’s observation.  We are all on this journey together…let’s try our best to dream and do.  I’m with you.  Best of luck to you today.

Theatrical Thursday, featuring Joe Versus the Volcano (1990).

Have you ever seen a movie six thousand times, but only gotten half a whiff of the real depth of that movie after the most recent viewing? Case in point; I’ve seen Joe Versus the Volcano at least 30 times since 1990, but only recently came to understand the immense truths contained within it. The film was always on in the background, and I’d often half ass watched it without really seeing it for what it was. The realization and understanding came slowly; a little bit here, a little bit there, until one day I said “fuck it” and sat down and really watched the film again for the first time. I took it all in with a renewed sense of awareness, and a considerably open mind. I dissected it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d enjoyed the movie time and again previously, but I’d only just seen the surface of it. And in truth, I was sincerely blown away. For all of its cheese, the movie was an acutely effective, multi-layered glimpse into a man’s thirst for knowledge, meaning, purpose, and self discovery. Looking beyond some of the dated, clunky 90’s camp, it’s quite a deeply rendered portrait of the journey that we all endure in order to accomplish whatever it is we want to accomplish with our lives. It is a great little tale about overcoming obstacles, standing up for your beliefs, and never giving up. Who can’t relate to that, right? And if you’ve ever hated your job, the “I quit” scene below is a revelation.

Storytime Saturday, featuring an excerpt from A Million Little Boxes – a work story.

I spent a great deal of time staring up at the sky. It was a lovely way to pass the hours. There was something about passing planes that sort of mystified me; it was their mystery that enveloped me and roped me in relentlessly. Who was flying? Where were they coming from, and where were they going? When I’ve flown, I’ve always looked down upon the houses, the buildings, the little towns, and wondered who was there…what their lives were like, what they did, and if they were looking up at me, wondering who I was and where I was heading. So when I look up, there’s that inherent desire to travel with them, the lofty anticipation of having a destination, and the inevitable excitement and adventure that seems to accompany it. It’s the excitement that was the allure there…it broke the monotony of the computer screen and scattered it to bits. Planes represented excitement…and tugged my mind away from the off key melody of keyboard clicks. And as a professional dreamer, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Story Time Saturday, featuring an excerpt from A Million Little Boxes – a work story.

When would I decide that enough was enough? Had I determined what enough was? Or when? What was my threshold? My breaking point? How much would I have to endure before I realized that I’d had it up to here? It had been years of the same old, years of stringing together reason after reason, excuse after excuse, line after line. Coaxing together a thin fabric of a façade that masked my true purpose, a purpose that had lain dormant for God knows how long. It was once asked if dreams deferred wither and dry up like raisins in the sun; I often wondered that same question. 
 What happens to dreams when they’re cast aside like old laundry into an old darkened corner? Do they begin to smell? Do they rot? Do they grow hairy mold? Or do they just die…regretfully, painfully, scornfully, and utterly unforgiving of the person that relegated them to that less than golden fate? Do we blame ourselves? Do we blame ourselves as the result of our jobs? Or is it all one giant soup that we’re all stewing in, bubble by bubble, until we reach the boiling point that sends us oozing over the edge of the pot and into the unknown? Maybe there in that zone lies the reason behind it all…the purpose that we all so desperately seek…the one that very few of us have ever truly lived enough of in order to assist the rest of us schlocks that were too afraid to step out and live.