A little remodeling, and hopefully expansion

Hello folks, I hope you're having a good Wednesday morning.

I'm in the process of doing some work around here, on the blog, I've already changed the button, so if you have a button collection on your blog, feel free to pick up the new one. I'm also on the lookout for a new layout; I like this one, but it doesn't really fit my sense of "perspective", which is what my blog is all about, my own unique perspective on life.

I'm also doing some work on my fan page on Facebook, because I have not done very much to promote my blog, and while I love having you 43 followers I have at the moment, I would very much like to have more. If you have not seen my fan page, click on the link in the gadget over there in the right column, and while you're there, "like" it, and you will then receive my posts on your Facebook wall, rather than having to come to Blogger to see them.

So, that's about it for now. Keep an eye out for the changes, as they are coming soon, and I hope to see you here for the "grand re-opening" of Perth's Perspective.

It's been a while.....

Hi folks, nice to see you again. It's been over a month since I last posted. There was not much to talk about. There was nothing new in my life, things are still "go to work, come home, sleep at some point, go back to work" most of the time.

That's not to say that things haven't changed in my mind though. Daily events have a way of changing one's mind, sometimes slowly, and sometimes all at once. I've had both this last month.

I turned 41 on Monday, a week ago, and that's about the most noteworthy thing that's happened to me in the last month. Saturday night however, I did finally come to the conclusion that I have to completely quit drinking. I was only doing it on my days off, rather than every day, as I did when I was a lot younger, but, physically, my body can't handle it anymore, and I don't like who I become when I drink either. So, that's the end of it.

That was the "all at once" change of mind I had. The other changes have taken place more slowly, but they are no less life changing. I have come to realize that through all these years of life, I still had not truly done anything just because "I" wanted to do it. So I did a few things that I wanted to do. No one suggested them, I came up with them on my own, and I did them. Sure, I asked for feedback, because these "things" I did were cosmetic changes, but the ideas for them came solely from me. It's a step in a direction I intend to take for the rest of my life. I am going to make my own choices, and stop following what others are doing just to try to fit in. I have my own life, and I am my own person, and I can do what I want without having to ride someone else's coat tails, or have someone else's approval.

You might just say that I know longer care about what anyone thinks of what I do, I'm just going to do it, if it feels right.

And hopefully, I have another 40 years left of this life to find out where that will take me.

Observations.....and possiblilities

As I have progressed through this life, especially in recent years, I have made some observations.

There's a lot to be said for experience, and although my experience may differ from yours, I can say with some certainty that you may have made some of these observations as well.

My father used to tell me that "times change, but people don't". What he meant by that was that even though technology advances, and our political and social environment changes, our core emotions and reactions to things really don't change all that much. That small "quote" has stayed with me since I was a child, and I have observed in my travels that he was indeed correct. No matter what is going on in the world, people still have the same emotions and reactions to things as they did 20, 30, or even 100 years ago. Show them something new, something that surprises them, angers them, or makes them think, and they will inevitably react in the same manner even as they did long ago. Pass a law that squelches their freedom, and they will cry out for change. Tell them that they can't do something, that it's impossible, and someone will find a way to make it possible. The list goes on and on.

The thing I've noticed most of all is that people, in general, are resistant to change. They are resistant to new information that challenges everything they have ever "known" about life. That's why we have so much going on in the world right now about gay rights and belief in things that are outside of what is taught to us as children. "The world is like THIS, and that's just how it is, and nothing else exists." That seems to be what we are taught. People then make that "knowledge" a part of themselves, and when someone comes along and challenges that, people become angry and defensive, instead of embracing the new idea, even if only to agree that it is possible.

I believe it is dangerous for us as humans to take what we are taught, or even what we learn on our own, and make it so much of a part of ourselves that we are unable to see that there is so much more out there that we can't see. It makes us rigid, almost like we are building walls around ourselves, and it keeps us from seeing that there may be a lot more to this existence than we could possibly imagine. We've already seen that there are many other things on this planet alone, whole ecosystems, that until recently, were undiscovered, and still defy explanation.

What if there was a whole world, that all of us are connected to, that no one ever told us about? It's commonly known as the "Other Side", but I like to think of it as the real world. Sure, this planet is real, and so are we as humans, but the other side is just as real, and it's where we live when we are not human, in physical bodies. I was brought up to think that there was a heaven and hell, and that to get to heaven, there were certain criteria that had to be met, or you would end up in hell when you died. I was also told that I was born physical first, but that I had a soul, and that when I died I would become a spiritual being. But what if it's the other way around? What if I (and all of you as well) were first a spirit, and then decided to BECOME human, for the experience, and to learn things?

I cannot stress enough that opening one's mind to that very possibility is, in my opinion, the very key to our existence. Once you scrape away all the "physical" education, and get down to the very core of yourself, you begin to realize that this indeed is the way to true happiness. The minute you begin to think about the possibilities of existence itself, and start to wonder "What's truly out there?", you leave your mind open to all the possibilities that this universe has to offer. My one hope, for the entire human race, is that one day we will all get to the point where we can embrace both our physical lives, and what it has to teach us, but also our spiritual lives, and combine them into the existence that I believe they were truly meant to be.

My weekend.....and thoughts about fears....

Hi folks, how's it going? I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day weekend.

I spent mine on my usual schedule, no extra days off for Perth....went to work Friday and Sunday and Monday, but Saturday was fun. I had an epic cookout with Bella and her crew, with steak and chicken kebobs, and a awesome lemon cheesecake. She and I had the idea to do the cookout for a couple of weeks, but it wasn't until Friday that we went and bought everything, and then she spent 6 hours prepping everything before I got there on Saturday.....she's such an awesome cook! All the food was great, and so was spending time with my best friend. I can't wait to do it again.

Otherwise, my life has been relatively quiet these days, and I've had a lot of time to think. Something that has been at the forefront of my thinking has been about fears. Fears I myself have had, and fears I believe a lot of others have as well. I think it's part of being human, us having fears about things. A lot of times these fears have a root cause of a lack of information on a particular subject. People are afraid of a lot of things too. Sometimes it's a fear of a particular animal, for instance, spiders and other "creepy crawly" things. Sometimes it's a fear of heights, or the dark, or even the fear of crowds, all very rational fears in my opinion, because there are dangers involved. But the fear I want to talk about today is the fear of not being loved.

Sometimes a person will feel that if they don't act a certain way, or do things as others would like them to do, that no one will love them. It's a genuine fear, and I think a lot of people have it, even if they don't know it. The good thing about this one is that in reality, it's a very irrational fear, because what it really boils down to is a lack of information. We as human beings are not privy to the thoughts of anyone but ourselves, and we try to "guess" what another person would be thinking, and we act in ways that we hope will ingratiate us to them. As you might have guessed, this goes back to my discussions about how people can try to be something for someone else, even if it's not what they want to be, just to feel like they are important to someone, or that that someone loves them. All in all however, I believe it stems from a fear of not being loved. It makes you feel that if you act like yourself, and do exactly what it is you yourself want to do, and want to be, that you will be alone, with no one in the world that truly cares about you. However, again, I believe it all boils down to a lack of information. You don't know for sure if anyone really cares, and you don't have any way to find out. But, that's not the real issue. I can't tell you if anyone you know cares for you or not, but what I CAN say is that even if there is no one in the world who ever thinks about you, which is very unlikely I might add, there is always YOU. See, the fact is, no one HAS to love you, or care about you, as long as you care about yourself. It is also my opinion that we all have guides and folks on the "other side" who are constantly by our side, watching out for us, and if this is true, then no one is ever truly "alone".

What I'm trying to say is that I feel it's best, if you have this fear of being loved, that you take yourself out of everyone else's mind, and look into your own. Ask yourself what piece of information are you lacking, what motivates the fear you have of not being loved by someone? This could apply to anyone in your life, whether it be a family member, your significant other (or the person who you'd like it to be), or even those you work with or go to school with. Why do you WANT them to care for you or love you? What is it that motivates you to be afraid that they don't?

What you may find is that you are looking at it from all the wrong angles. Have you been something or done something for someone, and now you are looking for that feeling you got from doing it to be returned to you? They are their own person, and there's no law that says that they HAVE to reciprocate when you do something for THEM. If you do something for someone, do it because you truly want to do it, don't do it to try to get something from them. Trust me, when you do it because YOU want to do it, you won't have any reason to worry about whether or not they love you for it, because you'll feel good that you made their day a little brighter. When you go inside yourself, and find the real motivations behind what you are doing, you'll find that in a lot of cases, you do things expecting a certain response in return.

But I'm getting a little off track here. I feel like the fear of not being loved is very prevalent in a lot of people's minds, but ultimately I believe the root cause of it has to do with not knowing that love is and can be so many different things to different people. So I really can't tell you exactly how to fix it, I can only tell you how I myself have done so, and hope that by hearing about MY feelings, someone else can help themselves as well.

For the better part of my entire life, I have had this fear. I felt like I HAD to have someone that loved me, someone that cared more about me than they did about anyone else, and let me tell you, it consumed me. It became my motivating factor for just about everything I've ever done. What I've come to figure out is that I lacked a key piece of information regarding this thing called "love". I was missing the fact that I should understand that I am a unique person, and as such, I can and should be that person. I spent most of my life living out of other people's minds, trying to fit what it was I thought that they wanted me to be, because I didn't know that I could be ME. I was spending way too much time outside of myself, trying to "fit in". But once I spent some time alone, inside of myself, I found that no matter who I turned out to be, there is always someone there who DOES care. Whether it be my spirit guides and those on the other side, or other humans here with me, there is always someone. And then there's me. If I am happy with myself, and being who I want to be, then an amazing thing happens. I find I'm happy, and I don't really worry about who else cares.

I know I've talked at length about this before, and I'll probably do so again. But I think there are a lot of you out there that have the same issues that I've had, and if reading this helps you even a little bit, then my "mission" is a success. I want others to be able to learn what I've learned in life. If I could describe to you what pain and torture I put myself through through the years, it would bring a lot of you to tears. I'd rather not anyone else have to go through that, so that's why I write this. It has taken me a long time to learn how not to live outside of myself, and to understand what it means to be myself, and I want to be able to show others that they can do it too.

You don't have to be afraid that you're not loved. You only need to be yourself, and do and think as YOU want to do, and you'll find that all that fear and worry will fall away, leaving you happy, and whole.

Thanks again for stopping by folks, have a great evening!

Some thoughts, because today is as good as any other....

Hi folks, nice to see you again.

Today I am musing, or rather, for the last few days I have been. Thinking about life, my life, as it is right now, and not so much about where it's going. Thinking about WHY it's where it is right now. Specifically, why it seems like I am at a standstill, when so much is going on around me, and in my mind as well. It's almost like I have been isolated, put in a bubble, and while that may sound like a bad thing, I've figured out that's it's not, and here's why.

I have begun to realize that I needed this isolation period, to learn what it was that "I" was, to learn what it was that "I" wanted, without the influence of anyone else to interfere. You could call it a "scheduled" hermit time, for retrospection, introspection, and, well, a time to learn about myself. I have been alone for a while now, without someone in my life, and I have been upset about that on a lot of occasions, but now I see that it has been necessary. I had to find out what it was that was "me", the kind of person that I really am. Things as basic as my likes and dislikes, the schedule I like to keep, and just an all around revamp of who I am inside.

In the past, I had always done things or felt things because of the way someone else thought of them, or how I perceived that they did, and it did nothing but kill my sense of self esteem when things didn't go like I'd hoped. This time of hermititude (yeah, I just invented a new word lol) has taught me that I am fine the way I am, and I've learned this in a way no one else but me could have taught me. No one but me to talk to, no one but me to answer to, it's been very enlightening and gratifying. And all because I gave up with the pity party of not having anyone "with" me.

When it's time, it will happen. And if it doesn't, so be it. I can be happy knowing I am becoming myself, and have a very happy life. I'm still not finished building "me", but I think I'm going to concentrate more closely on that now, so I can find out who "Me" is ultimately going to be. Let the rest, including any future relationships, take care of themselves when it's time for them to happen. I'm done wondering and longing for them. It's not going to bring them any closer, especially not if "Me" isn't done yet.

So, that's me for today. Hope your Monday turns out well, and I'll talk with you soon.

Notions.....of the preconceived variety...and self talk

Hello folks, and welcome to another chapter in my spiritual growth.

There has been one major stumbling block in my life for as long as I can remember, and that's been me having preconceived notions about either how a person was going to act or think, or, in the case of a situation, how events would turn out. I would basically draw up the scenario in my mind, and then "connect the dots" as it were, using the information available to me, and further, assuming that whatever I came up with was a logical and completely rational picture of the event or person in question. Sometimes, events, and people's reactions or behaviors would follow exactly as I had predicted, but more often than not, they did not. My preconceived notions did nothing but hamper my ability to see the people and situations as they really were. I had been told on more than one occasion that it was wrong to do this, but it never sunk in, until recently.

As it turns out, I was completely wrong in EVER adopting this sort of thought process. While I could go and write another whole blog post about the ins and outs of my internal psyche, I am just going to simplify it and say that the reason I did it in the first place was that I was extremely worried about what others thought of me. I rationalized the fantasized scenarios to myself as "thinking ahead", "being prepared for anything", but in reality, all I was trying to do was make sure my feelings would not be hurt by anything that person did or said, or how the events turned out, since I was so deathly afraid of what other people would think of me.

The way I finally got past it, the way I got over that huge hurdle at last, was to accept and acknowledge the fact that I WAS concerned about what people thought. And then STOP DOING IT, right then and there. It might sound harder than that, but to me, it's like anything else. If you really want to do something, really and truly WANT to do something, then you will. Simple as that. If you want to quit smoking, honestly and truly, then you will quit cold turkey, and never do it again. That's the way it works for me at least. It may work differently for you. That's something else I've learned. Each and every one of us is different.

We are all unique individuals, living unique lives, so it follows then that our thoughts, emotions, and reactions to the same stimulus is also therefore unique. So why should any of us be concerned about what someone else thinks of us? We shouldn't. One of the greatest quotes of all time, in my opinion, states that "What others think of you is none of your business." I figured out what that means, to me, and it has of course affected how I interact with others.

Because I no longer chose to think about how others perceived me, I also found I needed to perceive myself in a different light as well. For the bulk of my life I have engaged in some very negative self talk, telling myself that I wasn't good enough, I didn't do anything right, and all of it driven by the constant "elephant in the room" of concern over how someone else would think of me. Without that encumbrance, I can now view myself in a much more positive light. I can say to myself "I CAN do these things I want to do, I DO deserve to be happy...." etc, etc. It's very liberating.

I want to close by saying that if any of you are struggling with the same things I've mentioned here, and you're saying to yourself  "Yup, that's me, boy, I wish I could do something about it, BUT....." let me tell you this. You and only you CAN do something. All you have to do is be willing to see that you have no need to worry about what other people think. YOU choose how you react to what people say. YOU choose your own emotional state. YOU choose what thoughts YOU have. You don't get to choose for anyone else. So what anyone else thinks is of no consequence. It is completely in YOUR control to change. I did, and you can too.

Thanks, and have a great day.

Something was brought to my attention......and I'm really glad it WAS.....

Hello folks, and welcome back into my brain, into the workings of my innermost thoughts.

I was talking with a friend a few days ago, discussing our dinner plans, and I made mention of my landlady/room mate not making dinner that night. This turned into a conversation about how I'm a woman hater.

I'm not going to go into the specifics of the conversation, but what I am going to do is tell you what I took from it, and how it has affected my thought process.

First, I don't "hate" women. What my friend meant by that is that I have been blaming the women in my life for not wanting to be with me, for not loving me, and basically I've been holding it against them like it was THEIR fault, when in fact, the blame is entirely on me, and how I perceive myself and the situations as they happened.

I've mentioned before about how I was raised, or maybe I haven't, but either way, the short version goes like this: If it didn't involve school or church, I wasn't allowed to do it. I had no chance to socialize with friends for the sheer sake of socializing, nor could I ask someone for a "date", unless there was some relation to schoolwork or a church function involved. So basically when I left home after high school, I had very little in the way of social skills, and I soon realized that women were not fond of a man who didn't know anything about them or how to talk to them when he liked them.

That's one problem. After I left home, I blamed my parents for everything that went wrong with my life, especially in the love department. Fast forward 20 years, and now we have a handful of failed relationships, or mostly, relationships that never got off the ground. The bottom line is this. I have had a very screwed up sense of what women want in a man, and I have gone off the deep end thinking that they ALL just want one type of guy, a brute, a man who just asks "Who do I have to kill?" whenever a problem comes up. Couple this with a self esteem issue that I had formerly thought I had gotten over, what you have is a recipe for a person to deep down blame the objects of his desire for his own perceptions of why they don't like or love him.

Following this so far? It's very disjointed, I know, but there are so many variables in my head, so many things and thoughts that have come back to the forefront of my thinking ever since that conversation 2 days ago. So many things have happened over the last 20 years, that I cannot even pinpoint an exact time when any specific opinion or believe occurred. What I CAN say is that I now understand so much about my own psyche, and why I have felt so bad about relationships and women in general for SO long now.

One thing that also relates to this is my recent change in emotional state, and by recent I mean in the last few years or so. In keeping with this same theme, with yet another relationship that did not work out like I had hoped, I decided deep down to shut myself off to the feelings, to any kind of emotion pertaining to a woman. I know that now. I felt it was the way to achieve balance emotionally, but what it did was to water the "plant" of hatred that had been seeded a long time before, for those that had hurt me, and instead of dealing with the REAL issue, which was ME, I have let that plant grow until I could no longer see that there was an issue at all.

Right now, there is something I want to say.

To all the women in my life that I have had feelings for, and who did not have the same ones for me, I am sorry. I did not intend to blame you for my own problems within myself, but that is what happened. I became a bitter, jaded, stuffed shirt of a man because I made myself out to be a victim, and I was not, and you were right in not taking me as your "man". While everyone says that "I am what I am, take it or leave it", I went WAY beyond asking you to care for who I was, by having expectations of what you and the rest of your gender look for in a man, and have even had delusions of grandeur in feeling as though you should have fallen all over me, like I was better than all the other men. That right there should have been a sign to me that I had a serious ego issue. I apologize for all the trouble I caused all of you.


I can't explain how much makes sense to me now that I am finally aware of the deep rooted issue. I can finally let go of all the pain and hurt I've felt inside for so many years, because I'm not holding on to and directing it at others. I can feel emotions I have buried deep inside. I know now where I went wrong. AND, I can change it.

Thank you so much for listening folks, it means a lot to me that you have allowed me to share this with you.