Some shit that’s been annoying me lately

silver-tongue-bastard:

So everywhere I turn I see all this “feel-good” stuff about loving yourself and saying how you’re perfect just the way you are and never change for anyone and you deserve the best life has to offer just because, and I’d like to address this attitude of self-importance and complacency the American public has seemed to adopt.

1. You are not perfect. We all have bad things about ourselves. “You’re perfect just the way you are” is a lie. Seek self-improvement. This does NOT mean you cannot be HAPPY with yourself, but we should all strive to be BETTER people, all the time.
2. Claiming you won’t or shouldn’t have to change for anyone is silly. See point 1 on seeking self-improvement and your lack of perfection. Changing something about yourself, something like kicking bad habits or attempting to control your temper or trying to be more understanding (yes these are CHANGES) is a good thing. You are not compromising your integrity if you change for the better.
3. Point two brings me to a big issue; health and hygiene. Body image is the big talk these days. While being happy with who you are is always important, again, seeking self-improvement is always a good thing. Health and hygiene are important, not just for your image and self-esteem but for your future! If you like being a couch potato, rock on with your bad self, but remember that down the road, neglecting your health and fitness will have consequences. Being “happy with who you are” is not an excuse for unclean or unhealthy living. It’s a cop-out, a pretty veneer for laziness. Get fit! Encourage others to get fit! Notice I say fit, not SKINNY. There is a difference. Learn it, learn your body, and exercise. Again, SEEK SELF-IMPROVEMENT.
4. “Shoot for the moon and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” This is bullshit. You’re not shooting for the moon, you’re shooting for an A in your college class, or for that job, or promotion, so-on and so-forth. If you don’t get that job, you don’t get a consolation prize. You are still unemployed. Work harder.
5. Humility. Get some.
6. That brings me to my final point and I think the most important (because everything I say is important, duh). Avoid self-pity. Self-pity is the Devil. If someone else got that promotion instead of you, complaining about that persons faults and your merits and how much smarter and cooler and better you are isn’t going to get you any closer to whatever it is you want. It’s a waste of time and it’s poisonous for the soul and it will lead to nothing but a lack of motivation. What the rest of the world is getting instead of you is not important. Focus on you. Focus on YOUR work or YOUR grades or YOUR relationships. Life is not going to throw you a bone because you think the playing field is uneven or you’ve been treated unfairly. Go find your own bones

FEATURE NOTE: I’m featuring this because I think it’s something everyone should read. 

Sure, it’s cool to dream, to romanticise, to make all the bad crap in life go away by sugar-coating it or finding ways to explain it away. 

But the reality is that life will shit on you if you give it just a fraction of a chance. So don’t let it. Be proactive rather than reactive. Work hard, so that you can play hard and feel like you’ve earned it, instead of bitching because you have a misplaced sense of entitlement. Don’t give all the haters ammunition to use against you. Be selfish in a good way, in the name of self-preservation. Have fun feeling that you’ve achieved something, that you’ve beaten whatever demons you may have had. Walk down the street with your head held high for the right reasons, but know when to keep quiet and listen to those who have something to teach you. Be grateful for every lesson you learn, whether it’s painful or not. 

Attention.

All eyes were upon me, and the attention made me uncomfortable.

When I was younger, I’d been pretty much invisible except in times of ridicule. The under-developed kid who liked books and games and didn’t even register on the radars of the popular kids at school. Quietly sitting in the corner of the common room, scratching words onto a sheet of paper while crowds of cool people played cards and gossiped about who was snogging who. Creating worlds to get lost in so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the one I woke up in each morning.

I’d been the kid everyone poured scorn on for being the product of a single-parent household; for having crap, cheap trainers instead of the latest Nikes; for not having had my front teeth fixed after another kid threw a shoe at my face. For always sticking my hand up in class to answer those complex math problems; for being smarter. Ignored, for the most part. Didn’t stop them asking for help with their homework, though, the hypocrites.

I’d come to enjoy that invisibility over time, despising any form of attention; being able to just be me without having to keep up appearances. But all eyes were now upon me. Hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions; all staring, waiting for something profound to happen. Such was success. As much as the attention still made me uncomfortable, after all these years, it was time to push that aside and rise above all those demons.

I opened my mouth, the words came, and the people listened. 

Sorry people, I haven’t been reading much of late, either here or over at Inkstained, and therefore not doing a such a good job of being an editor.

The last month of school is always manic, and this year I have 35 extra hours to make up in little over four weeks or I’ll be deducted 35 hours’ pay - roughly 45% of a month’s salary. With not getting paid between the end of June and the end of September anyway, I really cannot afford for that to happen. And it’s leaving me drained at the end of the day, which is the only time I could read normally.

Hopefully things will ease up soon. 

Demons.

“You’re a hard man to find, James Worthington. You’ll be coming with us now. He wants to see you.”

I’d left the house I’d been occupying sometime around midnight. I needed to feel the cool darkness of night to quell the fires within. Fires that rose up and consumed my very being, should I go too long without doing so. I suppose you could call it a form of meditation; a necessary hazard of my being. The air was crisp; there was no cloud cover to prevent the stars from watching me.

I walked my usual route, out of town and up the wooded mountain that cast its grand shadow over the town. Up here I was closer to the heavens than anywhere else in a thousand-mile radius, and this soothed me. I would often come here and gaze upwards, wondering when I would be allowed to transcend. I was growing impatient, but I knew that given my history I would be made to wait.

I watched a satellite steadily make its way across the sky, then turned to look down the mountain. Everything looked so insignificant, as it had in my days of watching from way up above. There was a small light making its way up the path. A flashlight, perhaps. I slipped behind one of the pines that adorned the summit, and watched. As the light drew closer I tried to make out a silhouette, expecting to see a like-minded late-night walker. However, it suddenly vanished; the darkness returned and a desperate unease took hold of me.

I stepped out from behind the tree. Before I could take another step, a burning hand gripped my shoulder. A searing pain surged through my body and my mind, and I found myself unable to move. There was a blinding flash and a sound something like the crashing of waves upon rocks. When I was able to open my eyes again, I found that I was no longer atop the mountain.

I was in a desert, no doubt far from any kind of civilisation. Isolated. The sun beat down on me and if I had been human, the heat would have been stifling. I’d felt this kind of heat before; it reminded me of home. A home I had no desire to return to anytime soon.

I was also surrounded by demons.

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5.50 km // 0:29:00 // 5:16 mins/km.

BEST TIME YET! 

Class Discussion.

“Okay, what’s the tallest mountain in the world?”

The kids sat around the classroom table, unmoved and silent for what seemed like and age. Eventually the class clown put his hand up, not waiting for me to give the go-ahead before answering.

“Żarnowa Góra!” he declared, triumphantly. The other kids burst into laughter. Żarnowa Góra was a hill lying within the Góry Świętokrzyskie, or Holy Cross Mountains, and not very tall indeed.

“No, silly sausage. That’s only about three hundred metres tall. The tallest mountain in the world is more than twenty-five times taller.” I stressed twenty-five times and the kids eyes widened in awe.

“Mister David, does that mean it reaches the Moon?”

“Not quite! It would have to be another forty thousand times bigger to reach the Moon.” Gasps.

“How long does it take to get to the Moon?”

“Well, if you have a rocket, probably not very long at all. I think the Apollo crew took three days to get there, which is over one hundred thousand kilometres a day, or five thousand kilometres an hour. That’s like going from Rzeszow to India in one hour. But if I was running, at the same speed all the time, it would take me four and a half years without stopping.”

“Silly, you can’t run to the Moon. You have to fly.” More laughter all around. These nine-year-olds could be cheeky at the best of times.

“I said if! Of course I can’t run to the Moon. I could run to Żarnowa Góra though.” I winked mischievously.

“My uncle lives near Żarnowa Góra,” Gaja said. She was easily the smartest kid in the class. Slowly but surely they were all starting to contribute to the discussion. I loved these spontaneous conversations, much more than planned lessons.

“Is he a farmer?” the clown asked.

“No!” The girl sounded very defensive in saying that.

“So he’s a pig or a chicken then? My uncle said only farmers and animals live there.”

“Shut up, Kacper!”

“Easy Kacper, calm down,” I said. “Say sorry to Gaja, that wasn’t very nice.” And here starts the riot, I thought.

“No.”

“Kacper… don’t make me put you in the corner again. Say sorry.”

“… Sorry.” Gaja stuck her tongue out at him.

“Right kids, back to work. Discussion over. Turn to page sixty-three, please.”

And so it went on, another lesson with my youngest class. I smiled to myself as I watched them work. Teaching really was fun, when it wasn’t anarchy.

Hole.

I sat on the park bench, watching the world go by. I often did this; there was something inherently soothing about the lives of others. Enjoying the differences between and similarities with my own life, longing for some of the things they had, being glad of not having other things. Mostly, however, it was because time slowed down here, became irrelevant. No deadlines, no stress from constantly being in a hurry.

I watched an ant crawl over my bare foot; I’d slipped off my sandals and allowed the lush Spring grass to caress my soles. Dark sunglasses shaded my sensitive eyes from the blinding sunlight, and a cool breeze relieved me of the baking heat. It was, by anyone’s standards, a beautiful day indeed.

Yet there was something noticeably absent, and I couldn’t quite place it. A hole in my soul, a piece of the grand puzzle inherently missing. It wasn’t anything typical; not a lack of money troubling me, nor the lack of fulfilment at work. It wasn’t sadness at not having a special someone to warm my bed at night and to kiss me softly at dawn. It felt like something deeper, but it was nothing buried in my past. Unlike most, I was completely at peace with everything that had come to pass in days gone by.

High above, I noticed a stork soaring gracefully through the cloudless blue sky. I marvelled at its magnificence and regality. For a fleeting moment I wished I could lead a life of equal simplicity. Then I got thinking; all I had experienced, all of the pleasure and pain and hardship, had made me who I was in that moment. I happened to like who I was in that moment, and was reminded of why I was feeling at peace with everything. I had been on a journey that had crossed countless fields, vast oceans and colossal mountains, and my eyes had been opened like I’d never imagined possible. Letting go of all the pain and hardship, while acknowledging its role in the journey, had been a crucial part of that.

A child on a bicycle sped by my bench, calling out a cheery and accented hello. She was one of my students, and one of a hundred reasons why I loved what I did. A thought popped into my mind: you are who you are and you do what you do for them, for the future. That is all that matters in life.

Moving On.

How does one go about dealing with loss, with the end of something you thought would last forever? With waking up alone one morning when you’ve been waking up every morning for the previous two years next to that special someone? With suddenly not having the drive or purpose that kept you going? With finding yourself an enigma, devoid of hope of a better future?

That’s exactly the quandary I faced when she told me it was all over. A bolt out of the blue. She’d been told by the father of her child, her mother and her overbearing, dysfunctional boss that I wasn’t good enough, and like a sheep she had followed the shepherd blindly instead of following her own logic and reasoning. And so, homeless, jobless and penniless, I found myself at a loss as to my next step.

Now, in this situation, it’s easy for one to fall into the abyss; to give up completely. For a time I did just that, but soon one has to realise that this course is utterly pointless.

For it is not truly the actions of others that hurts us. It is our own minds, which allow the pain to seize control and ruin us. Mind over matter, people always say, without ever listening to themselves.

So I decided to listen. I blocked out that chapter of my life without ever letting go, forced myself onwards and upwards. I emigrated, discovered a new work, new way of thinking, learnt a new language. Immersed myself in the universes of novelists in each book I read, created my own in the stories I wrote myself. Drank myself stupid, pounded the pavements in physical exertion, met a multitude of interesting characters. Watched Time pass me by, taught the world and studied it in equal measure.

And eventually, I felt free.