From Where I Stand

Tag: life

  • Crushing the spirits of little kids (one bumper car at a time).

    Crushing the spirits of little kids (one bumper car at a time).

    There I was…

    Sitting in a bumper car amid youthful eyes, pigtails, and hopeful expressions. The ride was for all sizes 42” and above. My 77” self barely fit in the cart. Around me were those barely crossing the line from restricted red to admission blue.

    As innocence was radiating from the children behind the wheel, maybe for the first time ever in that position, I looked at them and then their observing parents. One father’s eyes met mine. His protection sensors went up.

    Fathers can feel this sort of thing.

    He looked at me. Looked at the other small children. I looked at his wrist. No wristband. He couldn’t get in. Decided to save some money and not spring for the $50 ticket to ride with his kids. I get that.

    I sprung for it. Now in a moment I had a choice to make. Do I smash full force with my 265 pounds of momentum gaining energy behind every inch of rubber track, jolting the kids into puberty? Or do I settle, drive around and seek out only my own seed to smash from the side?

    The little buzzer went off.

    I glimpsed at the sign “no headfirst bumping.” I thought about this rule for a second.

    I saw a kid, he was headed my way. I evaded him.

    With the 360 degree turn radius I spun around and headed in the opposite direction.

    I was rear ended. I went ahead, saw two girls, sisters I assume. Rolling around laughing at the fact they keep getting stuck. I decide to head in their direction, to lightly bump them loose.

    They turn into me.

    SMASH!

    Headfirst and it looked like I was seeking them out. I quickly spin the wheel, to back out, leave them be in the wake of their trauma.

    I await the screams from an irritated parent.

    I turn around.

    SMASH

    The child looks at me after the recoil of the abrupt stop of his cart. His head pulls up. The brief life he’s lived shows like a movie projected across his eyes.

    I back up again and break free from the multi-cart pileup. Free now to steer clear of anymore lives I don’t want to destroy.

    The gravitas of the situation enhanced by adult eyes, my peers with children younger than mine, make me want to park my cart and throw my hands up.

    SMASH

    This same boy as before, a kid with a mullet peering at me like I’m his elementary school bully. I smile a bit at him and he grits his teeth and drives forward at me again.

    Bump this time, but pushes me into the wall.

    “Ha. Alright, got me.” I say lightly.

    He bumps me again. Then he follows me, chasing me like a sugar-crazed kid who didn’t take his morning medications.

    I glance at the parents…no one seems to be watching him. I pull forward a bit, spinning the wheel to come at him with the little distance I have.

    “You little brat” I think to myself, feeling the surge of energy through my hands and electrifying my left leg to slam down the little red button to charge the car forward.

    “You think it’s funny you little….”

    BUZZ! “Alright riders, please wait till your cart comes to a complete stop before exiting the vehicle.”

    The overhead voice finishes and pan out to see my cart and the boys a few inches from the fronts of the carts meeting.

    I come back to reality. The fog lifts. I am me again, a father, a loving…um at least understanding follower of Christ.

    I….I sort of blanked on my identities and went to this realm of emotions.

    I relied on my body to tell me what to do, rather than what I know to do. I felt annoyed and competitively wanted to smash this annoying bug of a boy into bumper cart oblivion.

    Who was that guy? Where did he come from?

    “I’ve been here the whole time.” My mind says to me.

    Welp, guess I have some work left to do, and that doesn’t mean honing in on my bumper cart skills. But to humble my self that I might not be as good as I think I am.

    To choose the light, you’ve got to know the darkness inside of you.

  • Parasite x Brain.

    Parasite x Brain.

    The parasitic flatworm Dicrocoelium dendriticum aka Liver fluke, aka “zombie ant fungus,” infects the brain of ants resulting in the ant crawling to the tallest point of a plant preparing to get eaten for the highest possibility of fertilization.

    Imagine it.

    The parasite drives the ant up the stem to be crushed in the grinding maxilla and mandible of livestock, ingesting the parasite to flourish in a new home. Then, if it gets too cold, if the ant isn’t consumed, it retreats to try again tomorrow.

    Mindless-drones doing as the parasitic infection demands, with no other objective than to spread. Now, that is scary, good thing we don’t have such a thing in humans.

    Facebook

    Instagram

    Twitter

    TikTok

    CNN

    MSNBC

    FoxNews

    NPR

    CNBC

    Us humans, we like to think we make good choices. We want to be good, we want to do what is best. No one goes forward with full intention of making the wrong choice. Unlike the ignorant ant, humans have intentionality and we loooove to use our smarts to justify our choices.

    Maybe the ants think we are the crazy ones for being influenced by entertainment sources to tell us how to live. The fact that we allow the fictional narrative of social media to alter how we view ourselves might be reason enough for the ants to prefer their colony over a cell phone.

    What if…just what if…the narrative you hold about yourself, the inner assessment of how well you’re doing in life and what you believe is important, was built on false teachings?

    Though we aren’t being manipulated to crawl up any trees, sacrificing ourselves to the further pollination of disease, we are choosing to go to the top of whatever proverbial grass blade, (social outlet) there is and sacrifice our true selves to the influence of misinformation for capital gain or continued social acclimation.

    Ask yourself, why do I do what I do and what really matters to me the most? Take a reflective look at your life and see the truth of where you have invested your time.

    Our entire life is a receipt of where we spent our most precious gift. If you did what you thought you should do, or did something because you wanted to fit in, or did something because you felt some sort of emotional response that you needed to satisfy, then it’s not too late to make a change and start living as yourself and what matters.

    Some brains are too far gone. The infection has spread and lingered for too long and delusion has sunk in. The once-malleable brain now plagued with a barrage of persuasion has the ability to rewrite history to support the slow crawl completely motivated by the influence of the parasitic ideas hellbent on the host’s destruction.

    If life is spent on anything less than the most meaningful thing, it’s a waste.

  • Scared to let it go?

    Scared to let it go?

    Familiar pain is still familiar.

    When you get to a point of pain, let’s say being overwhelmed, how’d you get here?

    Often it’s a series of decisions influenced by perspectives, life events, beliefs about oneself, and a number of other contexts leading to the same result repeatedly.

    When stress is experienced, or rather you feel what you identify as stress as a result of some external stimuli, what do you do with it?

    Nobody wants to admit this but you might be choosing to hold on to stress.

    Truthfully, do you find yourself coming up with excuses as to why the stress needs to be there, why you just CAN’T let it go?

    Story Time:

    Alright, so there I was, another overbooked day of people to see. I get a message about a referral for a new person. My immediate thought says that I should take the referral. I pause a bit, thinking about my schedule and realizing I have no slots left.

    I say, “yes” to the referral under the justification that I will figure it out later.

    I get stressed about scheduling this person immediately. I put off the decision, “I will reach out later to schedule.” I waited. The next day, I needed to call this person. I am thinking to myself about what to say, fearing that what they want I can’t offer.

    “Luke, why did you do this to yourself?”I say to myself.

    I start to spiral and think of every decision I make and how I am such a loser for not being able to be better.

    I regurgetate this feeling throughout the day and feed on it. I lose sleep over it. I go to the gym and feel guilt for being so selfish, for not being better.

    I don’t want to tell my wife because I know she’s going to say that she told me so, to not take on so many people.

    I fester on this for days.

    I call the person, finally, and they admit that they weren’t looking for anyone as a therapist, but someone had suggested it; however, they didn’t have it in their schedule just yet.

    The call ended. Crisis averted, right?

    No, I then say “why didn’t she want to see me, am I not good enough?”

    I start to think about how poor of a therapist I am and how I should never see another human being again. I fester on this for a few more hours. It turns into a slight lull. I tell myself that I have to carry on with life functions because I have guilt over that too.

    Stress was my fuel here. I felt stress and held on to it, unable to give it up. I justified why this stress existed and I justified why I couldn’t let it go. I took on something that caused the stress in the first place, which I have done repeatedly.

    Why can’t I just accept that I overthink and try to overplease people, that I struggle with insecurity and therefore revert into self-defeated thinking and just let it be? Why do I have to pressure myself into trying to be better, as though I am capable of doing so? Why don’t I just let the thoughts go, let the stress pass, while I hold on to my values and be the person I want to be? Not the ideal me, or alternative me, but actual me, me with anxiety. What stops me from accepting this person, love this person, be kind to this person?

    When I make a mistake and revert to over busying myself, again, instead of getting high on my own stressful spiral of thoughts and then the thoughts of judgement towards myself, I can say, “yeah, I do that sometimes.” It is here, acceptance, that I can then work to live according towards what I care about, the wellbeing of someone else.

    From this place of acceptance, I can set boundaries and end up being honest and assertive and saying “no.” As we all should sometimes. Being honest is simply living in reality. I could have said “no” the first offering, or called and said that I have no availability, a number of things. But to do that, I need to sit with my first thoughts (people pleasing and stress addiction)and let the emotion pass (let it go) to then make a rational decision.

    So, I needed to check my addiction to stress and ask myself if I really am willing to let go of the stress.

    From where I stand, “letting go” is really not as simple as we all thought. In reality, many of us want to hold on and feel that stress. We might be habituated to stress, addicted to it. Stress becomes baseline, a reason to complain, a distraction, justifies victimhood, a number of reasons stress exists and is scary to let go of.

    Be honest with yourself and work at identifying if you truly want to let go of the pain and be free from it. Maybe you are choosing to hold on to stress to justify being a miserable person.

    Yes, people do that.

  • Just a Thought.

    Just a Thought.

    Walking into the gym at 4:30 PM.
    Horrible.
    There’s no one person or reason for this horribleness, it’s just an accumulative jumble of overwhelming stimuli.

    The guy on the treadmill wearing a weighted vest, why does that annoy me?

    The girl with the tripod videoing herself doing squats. Is she really going to rest her equipment on the free bench next to her?

    The group of 3-4 high school/college boys eating scoops of pre-workout. Low key bros, please don’t spill that stuff on the floor.


    The old guy hogging the leg extension machine, sitting with his towel around his neck, staring off into space. Look, I am not saying he’s got all the time in the world, but he’s putting up a strong argument for it.


    The “rapper” who is reciting the lyrics to his favorite song.

    “You a clone, you a Meseek
    You a house N………., I’m a Roadrunner, meep-meep
    Think I work at Best Buy with the squad how I be geeked”

    Also, he’s white.


    These people shouldn’t even be allowed in my head, but I see them, feel them, (smell them) and all of them together just stresses me out.
    Do I want to walk with a weighted vest on? No.
    Do I want to film myself lifting? No.
    Do I want the leg-extension machine? Yeah, but I can work around it.

    Kids, group-lifts, and eating supps.- I literally sold supplements for years.
    Rapper guy? I’ll just leave him alone, society will take care of him.
    So, why do I care?

    Ego.

    OK, short answer. But it’s true.

    But why does my ego need to judge others?

    Because I am deeply insecure.

    OK, so then, why can’t I just be better and stop the judgement?

    Because the judgement is intended to get my attention, to categorize and then distance or draw close to traits I find more or less favorable.

    But, why am I drawn to some people and avoid others?

    Values, genetical influence, upbringing and modeled behaviors, among a few things.

    But in reality, the why the judgement/thoughts exist isn’t important. In the current moment, I am experiencing and noticing thoughts. Simple as that.

    If I didn’t know any better, I would believe that these thoughts were me and I would let them hijack me. I mean, they came from my head, so they must be true, right?

    Nah. Thoughts are just thoughts. You can recognize them and let them pass. You don’t have to do anything with the thoughts other than stop yourself from trying to fix, alter, or argue them. Let them exist.

    If you have a friend who gives bad advice, but he’s consistently trying to help you out with his short-sided view, is it better to argue him, or let him share and you decide not to take the advice?

    You can choose to indulge thoughts if you want. And the thoughts you have in life will always be very compelling. Why? Because your mind is trying to get you to act in some way, and it uses thoughts to influence you to do so.

    What if I mean-mugged the guy on the treadmill, just to let him know I didn’t approve. What if I chose to tell him how stupid he looks. What if I thought about him long after I left the gym and then decided the entire gym is stupid and people are stupid. Is that really better than just letting the thought exist when I first see him and continuing to redirect my attention to the task at hand?

    From where I stand, it takes less energy to let go of something, than to hold on to it.

    Thoughts aren’t what define you, your actions are. You can think one thing and act another. So, the person you are is determined by your actions and these are under your control.