Seattle Trip and my Reassessment
November 22, 2008
Safiyah,
As you are already an international traveler, having been to England, you’ve done a little domestic also. The two of us, mother and daughter duo, went to Seattle recently to visit some family and a friend. While you played with your cousin Madeena’s dollhouse and occupied yourself with her many toys, including a doll-stroller and a miniature cindarella doll (sabella as you called it), your mother had yet another “reassessment” happen to her. This “reassessment” is my conscious name for what others like to call a “mid-life-crisis.” They happen about once a year in my life. I have come to a point in which something is not working for me.. it can be anything a job, a family situation, whatever. In my case, it is my job. So as you can probably guess, I’m going to vent a bit to you. Hey I earned it, dealing with your one year old self. You aren’t exactly easy, but I do have to cheesily add in that I enjoy every second with you and love everything you do. Now back to me. I am basically going through some kind of change. I know that my path is split at the moment. I won’t get specific because that will definitely bore you. And by being a bit more abstract and vague, it may help you more, allowing you to relate it to your own personal dilemmas.
I spoke to my father today. He told me that one of the important things I have to learn is to be confident in myself and my qualifications. The bottom line is that I have to potential to achieve my goals. But I need to match my potential with confidence. If I don’t believe in my own abilities, I can not convince anyone else of them. I have to speak to people as an expert, whether I am or not. Why is this important? Because its like the same lesson we learn from reading “The Alchemist” and reading “The Celestine Prophesy”, and all those other books about allowing the universe to work with you.. the laws of attraction, the secret, whatever you want to call it. They all say this bottom line: If you want something really bad and you do everything in your own power to achieve it, the universe will bend to make that thing happen for you.
Did you ever notice that the people who are most successful are the ones that followed their dreams, as random as those dreams may have been? Did you ever notice that the people who became successful were passionate about what they did, and focused on that one thing, no matter what happened? Success is not necessarily monetary. Success can be determined in many ways. Many legendary and revolutionary people we hear about today probably never thought they were successful during their own lives. They weren’t rich, they weren’t successful in any worldly sense, but their legacies live on in textbooks and teach people about truth and equality on a daily basis.
I have never wanted to be the person who gives in to doing anything just to make money and get a bigger and better house/car/outfit/toy. I have always wanted to contribute to society in some way, and that is what I have learned from my father and my uncle, and other inspirational people in my life.
The reality though sets in. I go back and forth with the dream and the reality. The reality is that money makes the world go round in this world. Yes, we are in the midst of an economic crash, and almost everyone is hurting right now. Its not about dreams when this reality sets in .. its about putting food on the table. Its about being able to buy diapers, pay the mortgage, and not go into deeper debt. How can we fuse the two together? How can we pursue our dreams, and keep the practical life working? There is a balance.. and the balance comes from being able to fuse the dream and the reality.. or realize that the reality can be seen as a dream. Does this make sense? Its about not taking this temporary life so seriously. Its about keeping one food in this world, while another is set in the mystical world in which nothing exists. Another way of looking at it is like this: we must pull together our worldly and spiritual resources to make something happen. One can not work without the other.
Now I just have to internalize all of these thoughts and make them work for me.
