The Journey

Don't confuse your path with your destination. Just because it's stormy now doesn't mean you aren't headed for sunshine. –Unknown

Greetings folks! Sometimes writing these weekly posts can be difficult, but most times not so much. One reason is that I draw inspiration from wherever it may come. It may be a line from a song, a scene from a movie, or a conversation with a friend or a stranger, and most times it’s my life. The most recent place I drew inspiration from was Twitter. I was on Twitter and saw a classmate and friend of mine post something I found to be very profound. His tweet read “Don’t confuse your path with your destination. Just because it’s stormy now doesn’t mean you aren’t headed for sunshine”-Unknown via @Humble83. This quote got me to thinking about my own situation.

Lately, I’ve been sharing with you my journey to the light. However, recently, I’ve been going through a dark patch in the journey. I’ve been sharing to relieve tension and stress and to hopefully help someone, somewhere, who may be going through the same or similar circumstances. I learned a long time ago that our struggles aren’t just about us. Yes, we are the feature characters in these scenes of life and we experience them to achieve personal growth, but we also experience them so that we may help others. We can never help a friend deal with the pain of losing a loved one if we’ve never felt that pain. How can we help someone deal with the anguish of losing a job and the subsequent financial insecurity, if we ourselves have never experienced them? We can’t. And what good is it to go through the ups and downs of life if there is no lesson to be learned and none to be shared?

The view outside my window hasn’t been particularly great lately. It’s been cloudy, with thunderstorms and lightning all around me and no fair weather in sight. When you look outside and all you see are clouds in either direction it’s tough to imagine that the sun will ever show its face again. However, we know that eventually the rain will stop and the sun will come out again. This is the faith and fervor that we use to maintain hope that the picnic that got rained out today may be held tomorrow. This same faith and fervor should be applied to our daily lives because everything happens for a reason.

The journey to happiness and the light at the end of the tunnel is filled with dark shadows, tunnels, thunderstorms and supernatural occurrences beyond our control. But, just because we can’t see the sun today doesn’t mean we won’t be able to see the sun tomorrow. Just the other day I was getting down on myself because things weren’t moving quite as fast I would have liked or as smoothly as I planned. Because things weren’t going my way and it was dark outside I lost sight of the constant that just as sure as the sun will set every day, it will rise every day too. I realized that I began to accept the stormy skies as my destination rather than see them as a patch of bad weather on the journey to sunshine.

Dark clouds will come, the rains will come and sometimes we will get wet. We can either go get a raincoat, an umbrella and continue the journey or walk along the path getting drenched. We can play in the rain and take it for what it is or sit inside and sulk. The choice is ours. I choose to grab my umbrella and enjoy the ride as much as possible, knowing that eventually it’ll all be over and that I’ll be better because of it.

I know that despite my decision to be optimistic and accepting of life’s bad weather things will not be easy. Just because you accept the inevitability of a hurricane or a tornado doesn’t mean that you have to be happy about it. It just means that you plan for the worse, hope for the best and if/when disaster does occur, you pick up the pieces and keep it moving. So here’s to choosing to keep moving on this journey, accepting that it won’t be easy and being resolved to reach my destination no matter what. What will you choose? Until next time, Stay Up and Be Blessed!

Vote or Shut Up!

“Every country has the government it deserves.”

Josephe de Maistre-French writer and diplomat

Greetings folks! Now that the conventions have come to a close, the parties have made their pitch about who they are and who they want you to believe the other guys are, it’s time to make a decision. It’s time to watch the high priced ads about whether this candidate will or will not be available to answer a hypothetical call at 3 am. It’s time to listen to the candidates tell you that the other party doesn’t have your best interests at heart and that they killed a woman, her baby and the dog that witnessed it. It’s time to listen to the candidates tell you about a law that was enacted that will bankrupt you and spread disease and pestilence to you and your entire family despite the fact that no such law exists. It’s time to take the facts, not the propaganda, the misinformation, or the stuff they call facts, sit down and make an informed decision. Folks it’s time to vote.

I’ll be honest, I’m very disturbed, well pissed would be a better term, about the number of celebrities, particularly in the African-American community, who have publicly stated that they have not, do not, and will not vote. I know some of you may be thinking “it’s a free country and every person has a right to do or not do whatever they want.” This is true. So long as the exercise of your rights, privileges and immunities don’t infringe upon those of others you have the right to do whatever you want. For example, you have the right to listen to Jay-Z, Maroon 5, Florence and the Machine or Jimmy Buffet. However, you do not have the right to listen to them at the highest possible decibel, at 3 o’clock in the morning, in surround sound. There are limits—boundaries to our rights so that others are not negatively affected by the exercise of said rights. One of the rights that should never be abridged, amended or infringed upon is the right to vote.

Voting is one of the most sacred components of a democracy. It is the opportunity to elect the officials who will represent us in OUR government. These are the people who will let Congress know that District 24 in Florida needs new roads. These are the people who will tell their fellow congressmen that Mississippi needs help with improving their struggling school system. These are the people who will speak for you, act for you, represent you and legislate on your behalf. Whom we choose matters.

There is no comprehensible or defensible reason as to why a person- rich, poor, famous or infamous- who may legally vote, chooses not to. The excuse that “my vote doesn’t count” is just that, an excuse. Recent history informs us that every vote counts (see, Bush/Gore 2000). The excuse that “you’ve been wronged before by politicians” is not a good one either. I’ve been wronged by women before but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop dating them. It means that I’ll learn from my mistakes and choose wiser next time. The excuse “we’re just choosing from the lesser of two evils” doesn’t fly either. None of us are perfect and neither are our candidates. We may demand more and hope for more, but we cannot be shocked and in awe when they fall short of our lofty expectations. The best and brightest of our time have all had their flaws, King, Malcolm, Kennedy and Clinton. Their mistakes don’t make them evil, their mistakes make them human.  Josh Billings once said, “Every man has his follies—and often they are the most interesting thing he has got.”  We should judge our leaders and politicians based on all the good they do. While they may have engaged in some morally reprehensible behavior, they still acted for what was best for society.

I have no misconceptions about our government. I know that it’s not perfect. I understand that some of the people who represent us in government are crooked, corrupt and unaware of the power of Twitter. However, just because the system isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you scrap the whole thing. That would be like trashing your car because it doesn’t fly or come with an espresso machine. No, we ride the horse that we’ve been given until we can find a better one in hopes that we may win the race.  Just as there’s no way to win that race without participating, there’s no way to change the government when we refuse to get involved in it. Democracy is truly one of the greatest forms of government in the world because it allows people to choose the government that they want. George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” If we do not participate then we have no right to complain.

Who you vote for depends largely on your morals, values and your station in life so I won’t tell you whom to vote for. Yes, I feel strongly about one candidate over another whose name rhymes with Orama, but you don’t have to vote for my candidate. I’d be happy with you just voting. For all the ills that reside in our government, many of them could be cured if more of us voted. Too many people risked life, limb and freedom for you to exercise that right so voting should be a duty, a requirement, an obligation rather than a choice.

At the outset of our great nation voting was a privilege that was extended only to land-owning protestant white men. Women, Native Americans, religious minorities, slaves, and indentured servants were excluded. While the franchise was extended to African Americans and Mexican Americans in the 19^th century, physical intimidation, threats, economic reprisals and Jim Crow laws prevented the right from truly being extended to most of these individuals. By 1910, fewer than 20% of African American citizens in the Southern states voted. In some southern states, fewer than 2% voted. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, almost a century later, that progress was made in ensuring the right to vote as guaranteed by the 15^th Amendment. Despite playing a key role in the Civil Rights Movement, women didn’t gain the right to vote until 1920 after the passage of the 19^th Amendment.

Many of us, because of our skin color, gender, race, ethnicity or religious views, have only enjoyed the right to vote for less than a hundred years, despite living in a country that is more than 200/400 years old.* The right and privilege to vote was born out of strife, blood, sweat and tears; too much for us not to exercise it. As the election nears I urge you to register to vote if you haven’t already done so. If you need an ID to vote, go get one. If you need a ride to the polls, go find one. If you need help understanding the issues, go look them up so that you can make an informed decision. At the end of the day, if we end up with a government we don’t like and that doesn’t work, we only have ourselves to blame. For we have just gotten the government that we deserve. So we have a choice; either Vote or Shut Up! Until next time, Stay Up and Be Blessed!

*(200 if you go back to the date of the Constitution, 400 if you go back to the date of the first successful English settlement).

Scared of the Dark

And even when my days were the bluest

I never ran from adversity, instead I ran to it.

Fear ain’t in the heart of me I learned just do it.

You get courage in your fears right after you go through it.

-T.I. “Good Life”

Greetings folks! It’s been one week since I’ve made the move from Miami to Washington, D.C. and so far so good. That isn’t to say that things will always be a bed of roses. After all, winter hasn’t arrived yet. For the week that I’ve been here, so far so good. I do miss my family and friends back home, but that’s a given. What’s striking is the large amount of clarity and purpose I’ve felt during this past week, which is a stark contrast to the overwhelming lack of clarity and purpose I experienced prior to now. For the avid readers of my blog you know that I’m a well organized, scripted individual, who always has a plan. This summer has been like an unforeseen script re-write. However, instead of asking for a re-write of a problematic scene or two I felt like God was asking me to re-write my life, which needless to say was a bit scary.

I felt like my life was in the dark and to be perfectly honest, the darkness is what scares me the most. Not the actual lack of light, but the proverbial darkness, the not knowing. Most of my friends are like me in the sense that almost all of us have always had a plan and have worked that plan to near perfection throughout our lives. And I, like them, loathe the unknown. When there is something I even remotely feel like I don’t know enough about, I go research it until I become comfortable with it.

When it came time for me to move on from my last job, for the first time in my life there wasn’t an immediate space filler. For the first time in my 28 years on this earth there wasn’t something for me to do. There wasn’t a plan. There was nothing. I felt just like that 5 year old who’s terrified of what lies in wait in the unknown crevices of the dark; scared. Here I was at the corner of WTF and What Next and I had no idea how to get back on the road to success. You see it’s nearly impossible to decipher what lays in wait in the dark. It could be a gold bar or a rabid dog. However, most of us seem to imagine that what lies in the dark is nothing but ghosts, ghouls, goblins and misfortune. We assume that if we can’t see it and decipher its intentions that it can’t be something that will do us any good. Honestly the chances of there being something good out there are exactly the same probability that it may be something bad.

How many lottery winners knew they were going to win the lottery before they were announced the winner? How many pitchers knew they would pitch a perfect game before the final out in the 9^th inning? How many of us knew we had met the love of our lives before we actually met them? (If you answered yes to any of these questions please email me the winning lottery numbers for next week. Please and thank you.) In a sense, these things all came out of the dark. There is no way to know certain things until they actually occur. There is no way to determine that your house will survive the hurricane, tornado, mudslide, blizzard, or tsunami the other houses on your block didn’t. As such, you plan for the worst and hope for the best.

This past summer I did some soul searching. No, seriously, I did some soul searching. I did a total re-evaluation of my goals, desires, hopes, dreams, wants, needs and priorities. I figured out all the great things about me, and I also looked at all the less than stellar things about me. One of the lists was substantially longer than the other but I won’t divulge which one. What I did with those lists was find ways to eliminate the negative attributes and accentuate the positive ones and use them in my quest to find my purpose. It may sound crazy, but experiencing the chaos that descended upon my life this past summer was the best thing to ever happen to me. In that chaos, that hurt, that pain, the unknown, the darkness, I found purpose. I found out what I need to do with my life. I can’t speak for what I’ll need to do at 50 or even 35, but I know what I need to do right now.

As I traverse this path to success, admittedly I’m still in the dark about a lot of things so I don’t have ALL the answers. However, I at least have a flashlight so I can see what’s right in front of me. From my view I can see the light at the end of the tunnel which fuels me to run faster and harder towards my goals or get a Lamborghini so I can get there faster.  

Each experience in life, challenge or controversy, is an opportunity to write a new chapter in our lives. Regardless of how great or terrible the previous chapter was, it has absolutely no bearing on the next. Yes, what you did in the past and who you were before has shaped you into who you are today, but it doesn’t it mean you can’t be someone different with different experiences tomorrow. Don’t be afraid of the dark. Don’t be afraid of the unknown. Don’t be afraid to pick up that pen or pencil and write a new chapter in your life.

Oprah Winfrey once said, “I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we’re not wise enough to see it.” So here I am, with my pen in hand, trusting the process and ready to write the next chapter in my book. I’m unsure exactly how and when this story will end but I’m excited about the part I’m penning now. Pick up your pen and let your trials and tribulations be your muse and write away. Until next time, Stay Up and Be Blessed!