Lessons of life

I was just thinking about life, love etc, and I came to the following conclusion. Love yourself before you love others. It is hard, but only you have the power to offer yourself unconditional love and support. There is too much beauty, creativity and life in the world to ignore it. Sure, we see a lot of hate on the news, but that is only what we are wanted to believe. The world in reality, can be a beautiful place, and if you are luck to have someone/several people, to do it with, then you are truly gifted. People say life isn't about the end, it is about the journey. I say in a way it is true, and in a way it isn't. Life is too limited on what we can see to say that we have seen everything in life. We can't hear/see/smell as well as many of our other living things on this planet, so we will always have something out of our journeys that we miss. But I say it is more the fact that you even started the journey is even more important. Any fool can stumble along life and call it a journey, but at one point, someone chose to start that journey where others just sit and wait for things to come to them. Waiting for things to happen is not a journey, it is a destruction of self. You must pledge to always grow and learn in your life, to love and be loved, to live and let live and to understand and come to peace with the fact that there is an end to your journey, and that point is the most important part of your journey. For it is in this final moments of life, that accepting and embracing the fact of death, will give you a more positive and calming reflection upon life. If you fear death, your life will be nothing but a list of regrets. If you embrace it, love it like you love life itself, then you will be able to look back on life and say that your not only survived all the ups and downs, the knocks and the achievements, but you can also say that you did the best you could with what you had. I learned from a very young age that my time on this planet is not dependent on anything other than my ability to live it. I knew that as a toddler, that life stops, that it won't come back in any form that we can see or feel. That at the end, there is nothing but the embrace of the void, an end so to speak. Knowing that, gave me a drive to enjoy life. I fucked up a lot of things, I listened when I shouldn't have, and didn't listen when I should have, but I own those mistakes. I made them without help or hindrance, and thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones to learn from them.

What did I learn? I learned that gender is non-existent. You may look male or female, but you may not be inside. I learned that sometimes you look back on things and say I should have stood my ground when you retreated, and retreated when you should have stood there. I only have one, well it isn't even a regret, more of a lost opportunity, and that is I should have been more clear on this issue. I should have listened to myself. And this is where I think the 3 1/2 generations that passed after my knowing this, have it a lot easier in many ways. Yes the discrimination still exists, but there are a lot more lgbt groups for support when there were none during or before my time. Embracing who you are, and acknowledging that is wisdom. Ignoring it of your own volition is ignorance or denial.

I learned that there are many people in your life, that you are expected to trust, whether it be family members, or the government or even yourself at times, but trust is only best placed in oneself, and the ones that trust has already or is able to be established. Trusting in an entity, be it invisible or a government or a corporation, is throwing away commonsense. Growth is understanding that there are two types of selfishness. The one that you show to yourself because you give too much to others, or the type that others use to deny you your identity and life.

Many things in life are taught as being black and white. Sure there is good and evil, right and wrong, but at the same time, there are certain things that are either inverted or are in the grey area. Clinging to one extreme or the other is an imbalance. Embracing the both or the centre is a balance. Imbalance makes life a hell of a lot harder and more miserable.

Faith, there is only one thing I have faith in, and that is that I will at some point in time, die. It is the only sure thing that will happen to me. Everything else is either left to your own choice or common sense. I have faith in love to a degree, I have faith that I love things in this world, and maybe that there are some people insane enough to love me, but the thing with love, and it is the hardest thing, is that love is not 50/50. It is 100/100. If you are only giving 50/50, don't delude yourself that it is being equal, it is you being half arsed about love. Only giving everything you can, and the other doing the same, only that is love, and that is what someone who embodies it, my dear friend Kasturi​, calls passion.

Passion is that 100% devotion to something, whether you have thought it through or not. Hey sometimes reckless passion can have good outcomes :-) . But if you are going to be passionate about it, do it for not only yourself, but for others (if that is appropriate. Masturbating yourself and doing it for others usually ends up landing you in jail for indecent exposure). When you are passionately doing something YOU love for OTHERS, you are bringing a small change to someone else in the world, and the only thing I have learned in life that makes the most sense other than we all certainly will die, is that you had best be doing something GOOD with it, otherwise you are wasting your time here.

Sure, we can all have likes/dislikes or even hates, but living in those states constantly deprives you of compassion and humanity. Compassion isn't about being a walking mat for everything that comes at you, it isn't that easy sorry. Compassion is hard work, for it starts with the compassion of self. If you can't have compassion for self, you can't really show it for others. That is empathy. Compassion is like walking through a thorny undergrowth on an amazing journey to somewhere beautiful. You will get scratched, hell you might break a bone or lose a contact lens. You might even be robbed or imbued with riches. But continuing towards that beautiful place/person/time or thing, will bring about happiness and unconditional love. When you are happy, and have unconditional love for yourself, then, and only then, are you ready to give it to others.