From outside the box

I am a stubborn man. I am stubborn because I do not learn from other peoples mistakes, I have to make them all for myself. This has been a hindrance and a gift in my life. Like so many other areas of our life, I think this all goes back to childhood experiences. Isn't it a shame that we are so affected for life by what we go thru in those formative years? In a lot of ways, we are still stuck in high school. I've spent my whole adult life trying to deprogram how so many of those early experiences affected me. When we have a negative experience and then, based of that experience, reach a conclusion about how things are, we call that a "personal issue". We all have them. What's important is what we do with them.

In the fifties and sixties, we were lied to about so many things that many of us developed "trust issues". It started with Santa Claus. Then it was things like....don't go in the water for 45 minutes after you eat or you will get cramps and drown, communism is out to take over the world, breast feeding is immoral, marijuana will make you insane, masturbation will make you blind, smoking will stunt your growth, we are in Vietnam to keep the world free, if you sin you will burn in hell for eternity, guys with long hair are gay, sitting to close to the TV will make you cross eyed, sex is a dirty thing....and the list goes on. Some things we were told were believed by the older generation, they were just ignorant. Other things were out of a desperate attempt to control us.

By the time I was a young adult, I was at the point that I didn't believe anything anybody told me until I tested the waters for myself. This led to a lot of healthy as well as unhealthy experimenting. I've stuck my hand over a lot of open flames (so to speak). The positive side of all this is that when I learn something, I learn it from first hand experience and I know it well. I don't say that you can't learn from other people's experiences. If I could, I probably would have had less heartache in my relationships with women, done less drugs, got less speeding tickets, never gotten in all the trouble I did in high school, been a better father when I was younger, and so on. But for me, life has always been about living and learning, not listening to advice from older and wiser people.

These days I try to integrate others experiences into my life, but I'm not very good at it. I still stumble around my own foolish mistakes. That's ok, it's who I am, it works for me. I think that these are the traits of the artist, the progressives, and the rebels of established ideas. We are the doubters and the questioners. We are the ones who will try new things and fall flat on our face. We are the ones who easily make fools out of ourselves at parties because we don't know how (and don't like) to play it safe.

Everybody is unique, we are all different in some ways. We either try to fit in or we use that uniqueness to pave our own way. We can take pain and turn it into creativity. We can take the lies we were told and turn them into a quest for truth. We can take victim hood and turn it into self empowerment. We can take indifference and turn it into showing love for others. We can take all those unresolved childhood issues and turn them into something productive and good. We can even use stubbornness to our own advantage. It's our life, it's our choice. We can't change what we experienced as children but we can decide how we are going to live our life as a result of those experiences. So if you read this and learn anything at all from what I just said, your missing the whole point!