Saying Thank You to my mentors and heroes

This is what growing up means, being able to look back on Life and appreciate our good deeds as well as our wrong doings, and see how much we’ve learned from them.

Everybody knows no one is perfect, but we all have some very special people in our life. What makes them special it’s not that they are divine and unflawed, but they taught and helped us being better. They gave us their time and attention. Those are the mentors and heroes in our life.

We don’t often realize the teachings and growth we’re getting from them until, when walking by ourselves, we notice we’re thinking differently, maybe more calmly, loving, joyful, smarter, faster…?

Nothing happens just by pure chance. There is a path, a path that leads us to where/who we are today. The hard part to accept about it is that this path is rarely smooth or sweet.

Remember the famous mantra: no pain, no gain. Well, that’s exactly it.

Our wake-up calls are usually pretty hard to deal with and accept, but they do bring us growth, they do open our minds and spirit to new levels of existence. Greater and more fulfilling levels of living.

Our heroes and mentors went through it before they could teach us. One day, we will also be mentors to someone.

To grow is a challenge, and to live our life we actually need to be heroes. No one can walk our way,  love, dance or play in our place.

In our childhood we slowly challenge those around us to get out of psychological dependency and become self-responsible, but it’s scary. No one will pay the price of our choices. But it’s that journey, out from home, overcoming challenges, listening to ourselves, figuring out what we really want in life and then going out and make the best to get it, that builds up who we become.

And no one, not even Chuck Norris, can save the day by themselves. We need people. Loneliness kills as Mother Teresa said it so well, “One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody. (…) Loneliness is the worst kind of poverty”. So we create relationships, we share and we learn a lot from them. Sometimes we hurt the person that is teaching us (we don’t know any better at that time). Think about it, we all start as a selfish and needy baby, but by living and making mistakes, we do learn to be better. That’s why it’s really important to remember the mentors and heroes in our Life. They shaped us and gave the nurturing attention and Love that makes us who we are today.

To them, my deepest thank you
and my deepest sorry when I stepped away and did not say thank you.

When did I stop thinking? I don't mean, having one, two, three or four thoughts in a row. I mean, going inside our deviant mind, going in so deep that you loose track of where you began, where you've been and when there's an end to it, because the phone rang or it just happened that you looked accidentally at the time, you have to breathe in deeply to come back to the "living".

When was the last time you went inside your mind and watch it unveil and reveal the immense world it sustains?

Maybe we even do it often, but why do we come back empty handed? There's so much to collect and bring to life, or maybe some of the thoughts could actually be thrown away...

It requires some effort to dig in and pay attention.
I want to pay attention...
Well, breathe in, breathe out and get lost...

"(...) When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - ... religion. Then I go out and paint the stars."
_
Vincent Van Gogh

on The feeling of being at home in the Universe...

Sometimes in Life we just don't belong anywhere. We have friends/family ties, but how much are we in them? We might make an effort, out of Love, to be connected, to be a part of, but despite our long wish for belonging, we don't see ourselves belonging anywhere.

... what a pity it is that people tend to consider those that become distance or lost as bad seeds. If only they knew how painful it is not to fit in.

We´re all making an effort. All.

But what goes on in our minds is for most a big mystery. Interesting or not, this continuous search for understanding life's purpose is usually what drives us into accepting Life's or society's challenges or walk away from them.

We become people in order to understand the soul, as this soul seems always so much larger than Life. But, for those whos Life has become unpurposeful, there can be a strengthening perspective that does change everything, and in this I believe:

"I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I mark’d Him in the flowering of His fields.
but in His ways with men I find Him not….
Why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world
but had not force to shape it as he would…?
_
Tennyson

"Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small."
_
Carl  Sagan

... There lives more faith in honest doubt. So don't hide your doubts from yourself, embrace them, but do take care that they do not control your satisfaction/happiness in Life. Aim to be happy. Think positive even if you don't "deserve" it. Regret only makes sense when is surpassable and a better version of you becomes possible.

Sadness of the Heart

The worst kind of sadness, I dare to say, is sadness of the Heart. We have this moral obligation to be happy, but as Albert Camus so well described "(...) there is no love of life without despair of life".

Life is a continuous challenge, lesson upon lesson... how easy it would be if it were easier... but we're not simple beings, and as Rottenberg smartly puts it, we have “the unaddressed business of filling our souls”.

That is why our Heart, for the sake of everyone, not just ourselves, needs to feel happy.

When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love and Love is our ultimate goal, the answer, da thing.

Because Love is learned, "What??!!", yes, Love is a learned dynamic interaction, when people around us, especially the ones that are there during our growth, Love each other, they're doing a great job teaching/educating us.

"If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? … The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all."
_
Thich Nhat Hanh

Love allows us to accept others as they are and then they have a chance to transform. But to Love, we must first understand ourselves, we must first look for ourselves. Nhat Hanh again puts it with simplicity and honesty what it is that search:

"Sometimes we feel empty; we feel a vacuum, a great lack of something. We don’t know the cause; it’s very vague, but that feeling of being empty inside is very strong. We expect and hope for something much better so we’ll feel less alone, less empty. The desire to understand ourselves and to understand life is a deep thirst. There’s also the deep thirst to be loved and to love. We are ready to love and be loved. It’s very natural. But because we feel empty, we try to find an object of our love. Sometimes we haven’t had the time to understand ourselves, yet we’ve already found the object of our love. When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day! (...) You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person"

We don't exist just by ourselves. nothing in the natural world does, so the worst kind of sadness is indeed the one of the Heart, because it means solitude, frustration, lostness from everything. We need to feel connected, we need to feel we belong, that we're understood. Life is in a way a form of affirmation, we come to this world screaming as loud as we can! so we need to be seen and recognized. Now, I ask, how will we feel if we're unemployed, unloved, with no home, with no place in the world? Find your way, if you have found your way, help another. That is Love.