Help Wanted!!

Do you have a hero?  Someone who inspires you, who you look up to?  Have you experienced something that touched your heart and renewed your faith in humanity?  Have you written an inspiring poem? Have a particular quote that inspires you?

I am looking for all of these and more to be compiled into a book, from contributors across the globe.  All people, all (tasteful) subjects, it can be anything from a personal recount of something that happened, a tale of a person that inspires you, a quote, a poem… whatever inspires you to try a little harder or go a little farther than you normally would (If it’s copyrighted material, please let me know where from, but original work is encouraged).

***Note: I’d LOVE to get stories from as many different places around the world as possible… !! If you know anyone who may be interested, I’d appreciate you passing along my request. THANK YOU!

Possible topics:
-The Honesty of Children (no one tells it straight like a kid!),
-Helping Hands (how someone has helped you, and made a difference in your life),
-Against All Odds (how you or someone you know overcame the odds and succeeded where no one thought it was possible),
-Animals are People Too (How a pet or animal made a difference in your life),
-What Makes A Hero – Inspirational stories from Armed Service Members past and present,
-Just for Laughs – Funny is good too!  Cute, funny anecdotes are a must for anything meant to make people feel better.  Bring on the laughs!
–SO MANY OTHERS!! Be creative!! :)

You can message me here, but you will get a faster response by e-mailing me at internationalinspirations@gmail.com

Thank you all for your time, and I hope you will consider contributing.

Amanda

Hope

Here I am, it’s been almost three months since my last post.  Not that anyone besides myself reads this, but guilt has prompted me to once again harass the unsuspecting web surfer with my musings.

Sometimes life just feels like we’re drifting along.  Not toward or away from anything, just caught in a sort of limbo between our past and our future.  This inertia is comforting at first- no rush, no worries, no pressing urge to be somewhere; but this artificial contentment is deceiving in that it’s like a black hole that sucks you in, and won’t let you go.  What starts out feeling like a short span of relaxation and recharging soon becomes a lifestyle, and when you’re alone, that lifestyle is depressing and bleak.

Sometimes this limbo isn’t our fault.  Sometimes we have the future all ready and set to go, but through no fault of our own, we are unable to move forward.  That is when things start to get sticky.  That is when the real danger for insanity moves in.

History, We All Have It

We all have a history.   Some choose to document it in blogs, or memoirs, or stories, and others choose to forget it.    More specifically, what about our emotional history?   Those people we cared about at one point in time, then, for whatever reason, those people are no longer in our lives?   What do we do with them?    How do we categorize them?

Some of us have long histories.   Some of us quite short, almost non-existent ones.   I, personally, have a long history.    I love quickly, deeply, and hard.   I let people into my circle of trust without the proper screening.   This usually ends up in me getting hurt later, repeatedly.    I also have the misfortune to forgive quickly, even if I don’t forget.  So it becomes a vicious cycle.

But, what do you do when someone from that history decides to paste a bulls-eye on your back, for whatever reason?   What does one do when they are targeted by someone from their past, who knows things about you because you used to trust them?   Who, for whatever reason, has decided you deserve to suffer even more than you did when they first betrayed you?

My answer? Love them anyway.

On Trust

What is trust?

The dictionary defines it as “Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing.“  I would edit that definition to add “…to provide safety for something of importance to ones self.“

The two main categories of trust are emotional trust and physical trust.  Each individual person has their own measuring stick on which is the more important of the two, usually based on past experiences in their lifetime.  To someone who has been physically abused, physical trust usually weighs heavier on the scale, and they would gladly enter into a loveless marriage on the sureity that their partner would never violate that trust.  A person who has been emotionally abused, emotional trust is paramount.  They will trust others with their physical safety faster and easier than they would ever consider trusting them with their emotional safety.

Holding Fast

For the last several days I have been trying to get the creative juices flowing, because I’ve just felt tapped out when it came to posting on my blog.  I tried writing on my novels, but that didn’t pan out.  Then I switched over to poetry.   It seemed to be working out pretty well.  I was writing, I was pleased with what I was writing, and then… I asked people’s opinions.

I got ‘this is completely wrong’, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’, ‘I didn’t like this’, ‘I didn’t like that’… and on and on.  Some was dead on.  A certain critiquer was absolutely correct in stating I didn’t know squat about meter.  Another may have been right that I was forcing a rhyme.  I began to look at my poem in a different light.  What I was once happy with, and proud of, suddenly became ‘less than’.

It’s Your Life; Don’t Blame the Road, Blame the Navigator

Anyone who has read Jack Canfield’s ‘The Success Principles’ should be familiar with the following equation:

E + R = O

Which means Event + Response = Outcome.  I have spent the latter part of the day pondering this equation, and how it has been at work in my life and realized I am a well-conditioned machine, fully trained to meet the majority of life’s circumstances with an immediate reflexive response,  most often to my detriment.   Take a moment to truly think about this equation, to truly absorb that your response to any event determines its outcome (the effect on your life).

If I have conditioned myself to blame an outside source for a failure, I will never be able to take responsiblility for my own life.  If I am not to blame when things go wrong, neither am I to be commended when things go right.  I’m effectively taking my life out of my own hands.  If my spouse has a bad day, comes home, and takes it out on me, my conditioned response would be to become angry at him in return.  The result would be an argument, or at the least, bitter silence, effectively ruining an entire evening, possibly several days.  But what if instead of an automatic, conditioned response, I had taken the time to pause and reflect on my choices in the situation?  What if, instead, I had chosen to hug him, and express my regret that his day had been rough, and declare my love and support for him?  Would not my outcome have been completely different?  Yet, how many times in a similar situation have we blamed another for ‘ruining our day’?  Clearly, the other person hasn’t ruined our day.  It was our own response to an event that determined that particular outcome.

In choosing to be accountable for your responses to events in your life, you are deliberately choosing the outcome.  It’s a very tidy system of checks and balances.  When you are getting an outcome you don’t want or like, simply change your response to it, until you get one that you DO like.

If you take a trip and get lost, it makes no sense to blame the road that took you there, when you chose to turn on it.  Just because an option is there, doesn’t mean we have to take it.

Make the choice to stop being one of Pavlov’s dogs.  Choose your response,  and by doing so, choose your outcome.

An Attitude of Gratitude (how we benefit from thankfulness)

Yesterday, I read Seneca, and more specefically, his works about Benefits (found here).  These writings have a large portion dedicated to the expression of gratitude in return for some benefit (or favor, or good deed) given to you.  Today I have been reading The Secret, written by Rhonda Byrne, which tells how the thoughts we have go out into the Universe and are magnified, and sent back to us (exptremely poor paraphrasing of an excellent book).  Tonight, these two principles combined in an amazing way to give me the the most profound experience of my life.

Indecision Paralysis

Society today is inundated with choices; Where to eat, what to eat, what to do, where to do it, and on and on. For someone like me who suffers from what I term ‘Indecision Paralysis’, just going out to dinner can be an ordeal in and of itself. First you must decide what type of food you are in the mood to eat, then you have to decide which restaurant that serves that type of food you want to go to, then you have to decide what you want to eat when you get there!  It’s not uncommon for me to spend a good twenty minutes on what to eat when dining out.  I’m always the last one to order, regardless of how many times I’ve been to a particular place.  I’ve discovered the following;

• The more options I have on a particular choice, the more importance I put on that choice, and the longer it takes me to make it.

In keeping with the restaruant example, I have been known to ask dining companions to give me two choices off of the menu, and making my choice from there.  I have spent upwards of a half an hour just contemplating a large and varied menu, whereas if I’m offered a choice of chicken or beef, I can quickly evaluate my palate for that particular moment, and make a quick decision.

5 Ways To Improve Your Relationships With Everyone Around You

All of us have nasty little habits that annoy those around us.  Things we do, sometimes without even realizing we do them, that make us just that much harder to be around.  A lot of these are ones we’ve heard a million times, and ignored because we either think they don’t apply to us somehow, or believe them to be such an integral part of ourselves that we couldn’t possibly change them.  I’m no exception.  In keeping with the theme of my blog, this list also happens to be a list of the things I will be working to eradicate from my own personal bad-habit arsenal, one at a time.

1. Interrupting people while they are speaking. – This one is just plain rude.  Outside of telling the person you are interrupting that you don’t give a damn what they have to say, it also tells them that you aren’t listening, and you consider your own opinions/thoughts/ideas to be more important than their own.  I, personally, am as guilty as sin.  I have a terrible habit of constantly interrupting others while they are speaking to interject my own opinions and thoughts.  Solution: I’m going to attempt to allow people what I recently heard referred to as the ’3 second rule’ wherein one waits three seconds after the other person is finished speaking before they speak.  How?  I’ll be wearing a rubber band on my wrist, and when I catch myself interrupting… that’s right. -SNAP- I’ll be popping it on my wrist.  My nearest and dearest will be aware of this, and have leave to snap the band against my wrist if I don’t happen to catch myself interrupting (as most of our bad habits seem to be, this one is so ingrained, I don’t even realize when I’m doing it).

Rediscovering Myself

I’ve spent the last several weeks in voluntary seclusion, evaluating my life, and finding it seriously lacking.  I realized I had nothing to show for anything I’d tried my hands at for my entire life, save a high school diploma.  I am twenty-nine, and counting, and this is unacceptable.

Not a single goal I had set in life for myself has been accomplished.

• I never got my college degree
• I haven’t traveled the world
• I haven’t found the person I want to spend the rest of my life with
• I can only speak one language
• I am not self-sufficient
• I do not own my own (profitable) business
• I haven’t made a difference in anyone’s life

Those are just a few of the life-goals I have set for myself that I have not followed through on.  The big ones.  The important ones.  The ones I try to avoid thinking about because everytime I do, I feel such an immense sense of worthlessness I am barely able to function.

This stops now.

This blog is intended to be a documentation of my journey toward accomplishing some (or all) of these goals.  I invite you to follow my journey, to offer advice, give encouragement or critique, and to share your own stories in the comments.

I am rediscovering myself, and in the process, hopefully creating a new me, a better me, that I can look at in the mirror and be proud of.