Another Morning Walk

I have a bunch of work to do the next four days, wrapped around the ringing in of the NEW YEAR. So this morning I woke up extra early, brewed some French Roast and headed out for a ride to the beach. As the day lit up I walked along the beautiful beaches of Siesta Key and was really grateful for where I am at. I really can say that I grew up in a coupke of really beautiful places, Sarasota and Rhode Island and I have always had the beach nearby. This morning I really soaked in all that was around me and it was odd, I appreciated the enviroment around me more than maybe I ever had. It seems that in growing up here, we take the luxuries around us for granted. I really should spend more time outdoors.

As I walked down the beach I began to think back to the last few years. While I am still a creature of the night in some respects, with age I enjoy and appreciate the beginning of the day more and more. There was a time when I would have to work at 4pm and I would sleep until 3 and then rush out the door and I would miss the whole day. Now that I am a little bit older I wake up a little earlier and allow myself to ease into my day. A wise man once told me that you can measure a mans happiness by whether or not he wakes up with the sun. A content man will wake with the sun eager to face the upcoming day, while someone who is unhappy will stay in bed, dreading the next day. I am happy that I have become the man who wakes up in the morning.

I walked along the beach today and I though back over the last few years and how I learned to appreciate the mornings so much. In Santa Monica I would wake with the sun and walk down the beach toward the peir from Venice towards Broadway where I would spend the first few hours of the day writing at a great coffee shop that I called my office. I loved watching the beach wake up, but I enjoyed having such a sort after beach all to myself even more and enjoyed finding the treasures left behind by nightwalkers as I avoided the streets and walked to my destination oceanside.

I thought of my mornings in the French Quarter. It was a little different in New Orleans, sometimes I would be getting off of work as the sun came up, but every day around 6 am I would walk down Bourbon St. through the French Quarter as the men were spraying down the streets and I always felt privileged to have the place all to myself. Even Bourbon St. is clear of people on most days at six in the morning and I was able to walk down freshly cleaned streets and look at the beautiful history in a different light than most people see it late night partying.

When I first arrived in Santa Cruz I would walk down the street to the beach. At first I stayed at the hostel on 3rd St. and I would walk down the giant hill to the Boardwalk and walk down the Peir and spend the quiet mornings laughing at the barking sealions. Sometimes I would walk from a friends down to Pleasure Point and sit seaside on a bench and watch the surfers hit the surf trying to catch the first wave of the day and when I lived in the mountains, I would stroll through the Redwood forest where the giant trees blocked out the morning sun, until you got to the top and I would watch the fog burn off and the beach appear off in the distance.

In my travels I learned to appreciate the mornings. I realized that my world is a beautiful place and I am lucky to have found great places to dwell, sometimes by choice and other times by chance. This morning I really noticed how great my little town and its little island are early in the morning. As a kid I used to party until all hours of the night on the key and wake up with the sun and rush to get out of it. Today, I sat on a catamaran and watched the tourist trying to get the first sea shells which washed up the night before and I felt privileged to be able to start my day here, home.

It's funny how my journey took me back to Sarasota. As soon as I got here I faced the things that were holding me back and now I am able to work hard and really enjoy the things that are around me. I don't spend my nights out at bars (that doesn't mean I am an angel) and I am able to take walks downtown and on our islands. Right next to my apt. there is a bike path that leasds to downtown and sometimes, rather than take two buses one from my house to the bus terminal and then to work, sometimes I just walk down that bike path and walk through downtown as the morning wakes up. Usually on my walk I see someone I know and it is a neat feeling to be home, in familiar surroundings.

As I have mentioned that my plans are to leave here sometime by spring, but while I am here I am taking advantage of every moment that I am here and enjoying what is good in my life, what is NOW and for me, thats what it is all about.

ONE LOVE
tilly

I Don't Care What People Think

Life is funny. It seems like I spent years trying to explain myself to people, when I hadn't even figured out myself yet. Now, I am pretty easy to figure out. At least in some respects. 3 years ago I set out to rewire my brain and my emotional self and I have adventured along life blogging it all. If you want to get to know how I think, my blog is a good start.

I started on myspace and it was after my divorce, I was quite negative and if you read my blog then (thank you) and still read (thanks again), it is obvious the changes that I have underwent and you have definitely been able to read along as I have logged some of the methods that I have used in my transformation. I have grown up, I know who I am!

It's silly. I was a BAD kid. Real bad. As I transitioned from adolescence into adulthood I wanted to fix everything. I wanted to discover who I was and I wanted to please everyone else at the same time. What I ended up doing was taking everyone else's advice and then feeling like crap when I didn't receive recognition for doing what people said I should do! I was a great student, a good husband and while I still made a ton of mistakes, I did a lot of things exactly the way people said that I should. Unfortunately I was always quitting things as what would please one, would disappoint another and I was never really happy.

As time progressed and I began to get older, I looked back at my failures and I realized that some things that others considered failure in my life, I viewed as successes. I came to realize that I can't please everyone, so I began to slowly disregard the advice of people who I did not find to be successful in their own lives. Soon I was left with family, the people who were supposed to be the closest to me. I began to realize that deep down inside, I was always trying to please family, but again, I have many family members and the advice from family frequently contradicted each other. I again found myself to be a failure in others eyes and then in my own.

Now, over the last three years I have really been trying to put myself out there in the world. To be by myself in key positions of survival and rely not on the advice of others, but on the little voice inside my gut and on God. There have been so many situations over the last three years that literally have been life or death situations and there was no one to advise me. Sometimes I got weak and I ran back to my comfort zone. Sometimes, I gave up briefly and stepped off of my path and tried to do what others thought that I should do. EVERY TIME I DID THAT MY HAPPINESS LEFT ME AND EVERYTHING STOPPED WORKING....no matter how hard I tried.

Now, I have really chosen to make my own choices and decisions. I have become confident in that which I do and I have really noticed that no matter what I do, people are going to have an opinion. The crazy thing is most of the people with the strongest opinions are the people who think that they know me the best, but listen to me the least.

Now that I have truly discovered who I am, what I want and where I am headed I have established a game plan for myself. I used to have the desire to tell everyone who would listen to me what my next move was and unravel all of these big plans that I had in my life before them. Of course I wasn't sure what I was doing so when I didn't complete those things I appeared to be a failure in not only my eyes but in their eyes as well.

Nowadays I don't tell anyone what my game plan is. I am and have been on a path that I have totally created and I have goals for the next minute, day, month and year. The path that I have chosen for myself is a very unorthodox path, but I believe that it is the best one for me and it is a plan that I believe will make me a very successful person. However, I may not view success the same way as YOU might. I am very excited about the goals that I have completed this past year and especially this past 3 months and even though sometimes I fell off of my path, EVERY TIME I DID I GREW AND BECAME STRONGER. I no longer care how people view me, or what they think of me and I feel very sorry for the people with whom I have tried to display the changes that I have underwent and who have chosen not to pay attention.

There are some relationships in my life that still need healing. I spent much time and energy working on myself and on my relationships with the people who I consider important in my life. Some of my relationships have mended quite easily, while others require not just me to put forth an effort but US to put en effort into it together. I have tried to force other people to work with me, (trust me if you are reading this and you think it is you, it probably is, but you are not the only one so don't get to pissed off) but some people do not want to accept that they need to change. I did accept that I needed to change and still accept that there are areas in my life that need changing. Some problems that we have in life are not based on this moment, but are deep rooted in the past and the only way to work them out is to own up to our ends, face them and work them out together. If these things are not done, the relationship never mends. There are two sides to everything.

So in these relationships in which I could not create a team effort in mending, I satisfied my end to the best of my ability, stood my ground where I needed to and always have left an open door for healing. I hope that some day that door is entered. Either way, I have accepted that things are the way that they are in my life and I have stopped trying to force things to GET FIXED or GET BETTER. I have stopped trying to explain to people who I am or tried to get people to accept me. It's so funny that now that I have done so and I have stopped trying to communicate with people who were taking and not giving, I am hearing MORE through the grapevine that the rumor is that I am broken.

How funny,
I have never felt better and while I don't always follow the rules, for the first time in my life I can stand tall, stand alone and feel completely strong and whole. I regret that relationships are drifting away. But I also accept that I have changed and am changing and these relationships may not have been healthy in the first place, or they may have never even been and I was trying to create something that was not.

I now sit back and accept who I am, love who I am and am eager to grow more and to share myself with the world. I have a game plan and I like my plan and there is nothing that is going to sway me from my goals. It's ok, you may not agree with me, you may think that I am all wrong, but I remain unswayed. I live my life exactly the way that I want and I have a reason to my ryhme. While some people may not agree with my values or with the things that I do, if they want to be in my life they should accept them and encourage me as I encourage the people around me, don't try and change me. That's what the people I have kept close in my life do, we support and uplift each other and do not judge. I believe in supporting people close to me and trusting in their ability to be EXACTLY what they want to be. That's what friends should do, lift each other up....

~1 love
tilly

Christas Worries Blown In the Wind

This evening at work I was brought into a situation which without my planning it, forced me to deal with certain aspects of my wild childhood and of my past. I came to Sarasota with these goals in mind a few months ago and I am VERY pleased with the things which I have accomplished up to this point.

Now, I don't tell people my goals these days. For the past three years I have been very seriously and attentively focusing on what is internal, as I have become convinced that this type of focus was and is imperative for me the last few years and will open many doors towards success in the buisiness and relationship areas of life in the future.

Over the past three years I have been very in-tune with my emotional and mental noise and I have spent countless hours learning how to focus on the present moment entirely while at the same time confronting damages which were done to me in my past and also damages which I totally created for myself. I have totally retraced my foosteps in life and my adventures have forced me to deal with the things that I had always ran from in the past, my past and 3 months ago I arrived here in Sarasota to face these demons head on and that is precisely what I have done.

Today, I was wairing on a table of some obviously very educated men of statrure and their wives, when I realized that one of them was a judge who I had appeared before over 15 years ago as a teenager, when I had participated in the theft of a Chevy Blazer. This situation was the first of many bad choices that I begabn making as a teenager and rather than avoiding that this experience happened to me, I connected with the judge and informed him that I was very grateful for his services, that kids CAN change and that the way that he handled mhy situation played a certaiun part in who IU have become today. Neat, huh?

What is funny to me right now is that I am abrubtly learning that my stay here in what used to be my LITTLE town of Sarasota. I now see this town as a completely different place and I have noticed that it is quite east for me to face a lot of the things which I have chosen to confront and my work is finishing fast!

One of the main reasons that I have come to this town was to show myself and the people who mean something to me that no longer to I have to run with certain crowds of people, or date a certain girl to form the identity which I present to the world. I have learned over the last three years not to be cocky, to give back to life and to be an example rather that a distraction from that which is important in life. This has become a time when I should feel really lonely, I have withdrawn myself from many friendships and really learned to be proud of the man that I am, not matter what other people view me as. No matter who those people are.

One of the main reason that I came here, was because my brother and sister are here and this would be the first Christmas in a very long time, that my mother, siblings and neice would all have to ourselves. It was important to me to be able to bond with them over this Holiday Season, because in the past there have been a very lot of things in each of our lives that have become obstacles in our relationships. While I love my Step Family and also my other relatives, I have felt that this was a time for blood toi bond and to show each other that life is less about stuff and more about becomeing closer with the ones with whiom we entered the world.

I had set myself up to really foucus on what I needed to let go of certain issues within my family and regardless of whether or not myh family had or has the same objective, I knew that I would be able to show off what I have become. I havde become something that I am very proud of. While I no longer run my own business or have my own home. I rent a little apartment with friends and I had come back home with absolutley nothing, so it was important for me to show off what I have attained in such a short period of time, who I have become over the past three years and just share what other people have been stopping me daily about. Share ME. I haven't been able to do that maybe EVER. Until now.

Christmas was GREAT! My mother arrived with my stepfather and we were all able to spend Christmas Eve together opening gifts. On Christmas morning, they made Filets and Eggs and my neice got to see Sanas gifts first thing in the morning. I have never seen my Josi open Santas gifts and I regret that I had to go home and shower and clean up from working my 13th day in a row and a double. Transportation is very difficult for me and I had hoped that someone would help me get back. Unfortuately I spent my Christas day in bed. Everyone then split up and took naps and later in the Evening I was able to go to my work with my mother and stepdad and neice, sis and boyfriend and my brother, who was cooking was able to show his expertise in the kitchen off to my mom. We are all proud of him and while it was now my 14th day a row at my work. I felt good for my brother. I also am a waiter at our resturant and while waiting tables is sort of a step back for me, I am also proud of where I work and am proud to show my mother that I do what it takes, even if it means work every day of the week.

I was not able to wait on my mother and Al. For the next two days I was working a double straight through ( that means I open the joint at 10 and usually work to around 10 at night ) my Mom was only here for 3 days and I knew that she really liked Karaoke so I suggested that we all visit a new concept in town where you get your own private Karaoke rooms and can all sit around and eat, drink and be merry. I had hoped to visit that evening after work. Unfortuanatly I had no break and worked rather late. The family went to KROAKEYS in the afternoon while I was at work and while dissapointed, had fun laughing at the stories that were told to me during my phone calls after work. Good old family bonding, something that is not done enough, something that I rented a place so close to my family to regain.

Unfortunately, I was not able to meet back up with everyone after the night we had dinner at my work. I worked two 12 hour days and when I got off of work, everyone had already dispersed into their own homes and lives. While I only had the one solid day CHRISTMAS off of work, I unfortuately missed out on the Christmas lights and walks around St. Armands Circle. I was however able to see people and invite my family back into my work while I was working. I owed my mom a few bucks anyhow, so it made sense and my family was really able to have some togetherness that was much needed.

I am very proud of who my brother and sister have become. Mhy sister is a mom and everyone moved home during a really bad economhy and not one of us leached off of anyone or took advantage of kindness. We all individually were able to set up shop, get jobs, our own places and afford to share gifts with out immediate family this Christmas. This is the first time in a while that I was able to do this. After my divorce I was pretty unstable and broke a lot, I also was travelling and I missed out (regrettfully) on many bonding moments. This year I really reached out and offered everything that I could and I made every effort that I could to happily enjoy time with everyone.

Thats one more mission acomplished....PASSPORTS anyone?