You hate to admit it, but you were caught up in all the glitz and glamor. You were seduced by the gadgets and the millions of tools designed to make life better.
In all of that hoopla and hootenanny, you lost focus on what has made you who you are. The Basics. The Nitty Gritty. The Nuts and Bolts. The Guts. The Innards.
The Core.
You need, as Vizzini said, to go back to the beginning. The Roots. The … go back to the core values.
A shortstop cannot make a flashy double play if he cannot even field a grounder. A guitarist cannot rip into a whaling guitar solo if he cannot even get the basic chords down. A man cannot become the leader of his country without first knowing the history and foundation of that country.
There are, of course, always exceptions.
You make too many meaningless statements, and it limits your progress in this life. Day in, day out, you basically say words that really mean pretty much very little, for all intents and purposes. At the end of the day, fundamentally, as far as that goes, you truly spend far too much time groping for your words. If your goal was to hit one out of the park, you got held up at the gates, and didn’t even step up to the plate. Furthermore, if I may say so, essentially, at the bottom line, you sound like an idiot, with all due respect, and stuff like that.
You need to realize that your desire to communicate quickly is causing you to communicate slowly. Look at Mr. Obama. He chooses his words the way a thin man chooses meats on a buffet. He pauses, considers the situation, reflects upon his intentions, and selects the most succulent and succinct sentence. Like all forms of organization, a cluttered thought process makes for twice the work with half the result.
Too often people are simply waiting for their partner to pause for breath, so they may ejaculate their own thoughts. Worse still, the hurried rush to explain one’s self forces one to repeat sentiments, talk in circular patterns, and generally prattle on and on and on. It is the verbal equivalent of Shaggy and Scooby-Doo attempting to elude a spook by spinning their leg-wheels. Whole lotta noise, whole lotta movement, and no one is any closer to their destination at the end of it.
Eliminate the superfluous words in your speaking. Pause, consider, and react. Do not be afraid of the tiny gaps in conversation. If a person is asking your advice, give them measured advice, not senseless cliché and blather. You are insightful. Prove it.
You are hellbent on succeeding. You put in 80 hour work weeks and burn the candle from both ends. Early to rise and late to bed. You run yourself until you are completely out of fuel.
Eventually, it is going to catch up to you.
You hear people talking to you, but the words sound hollow and distance. That is because you are tired and find concentrating very difficult.
You can achieve so much because you are intelligent, driven, and caring. When you are well rested, you can achieve even more.
You have just about had it with the chains that bind you. Row after row of always red, smiling signs point you to the dining corrals that dot our countryside. Lunch meetings, exit ramp dinner dates, somewhere we can all agree to eat. The food is at once soulless and yet smarmy, plasticine and yet mealy. You shovel, fork, and spoon the banal foodstuffs into your mouth, sit through the tepid wait staff’s cajoling, and leave the prescribed and perfunctory 17%, so as to not appear cheap nor pretentious.
Like parasites, these structures appear without notice, ready to feed on the tender occupants of office parks and commercial zones and colleges across the nation. You see their construction, and are stricken by the duality of your anticipation of “something new” at first, and the brief pang of disappointment as you choke your way through another bland meal, slightly oversalted by an overzealous cook in the back, striving to make some, hell, any flavor appear in tonight’s frozen and reheated entree.
The salmon tastes like fishsticks. The steak tastes of ham. The soda is flat, the servers are, too. Or greasy and overtall, their lank and dank emo hair requiring constant attention, endless adjustment, and everyone’s patience. They swear to you total efficiency, and careless demeanor, but as plate after plate of poorly aimed and mistimed foods strike the surface of your table, you nestle down into the sameness of it. There is almost a comfort in sub-par mediocrity. You play with your cutlery too much.
It wasn’t always this way. You remember greasy spoons, or white linen cloth affairs. You remember roadside burger grills and malt shops and deco themed seafood houses and genuine cafeterias. Food was versatile, and if you were willing to risk the latent threats of salmonella and heartburn, you could find satisfaction at the hands of a man in a well stained white apron, his wife patiently ringing in the fare of another happily swollen stomach.
These neuvo dísh cardboard and cookie cutter chophouses leave everything to the imagination. The ubiquitous cobb salad, the ever-present and seemly potato skin, and the never ending march of an army of lifeless and lackluster flatbreads have replaced any food that smacked of locality, or ingenuity.
There is a place near you that is still serving food that isn’t selected by a boardroom, their tongues, tastebuds and palates stripped off and sanded smooth by the power of the last customer’s complaints. You should find that place.
After you’ve decided you are tired of eating the same six meals served by automatons with too much chatter and too little platter, you must struggle to deny the sentence that has been passed upon you, this utter surrender to the bland and faceless chains. Try it all. Pan-Asian, Moroccan, Vegan – Yes. Meat on a Stick, even. Get it, try it, maybe you will like it. Your need to feel something on your tongue, against your teeth, in your belly; it drives you to try new things, and maybe even to cook for yourself. At the very least, you musn’t stand like some sheep, willing and waiting, wishing they would please, please, please call for your table.
You are in a rut, and you know that you would eat free, if you only knew where to go.
You are truly a good person. You are kind and considerate. You are helpful, loving, and caring. However, you are wasting the good you can do. You spend time swimming out into the lake to save each person, one by one. You could, instead, build a raft in the middle and allow them to swim to you.
You are apprehensive about this approach because you sometimes feel that someone might get lost in the mix.
The path is for you to choose. Know that, either path is filled with loss and great glory. Each path will have setbacks and triumphs. Each path will lead to people having better lives because of you.
You just have to choose which route you think will do the most good.
You do not have to be at work every single day. Your boss has allocated vacation time for you. The company has set up a standard plan to allow you to be away from your workstation for a handful of days out of every year.
You should take advantage of that. Every now and then you need to get away and recharge yourself.
If you work yourself to death, the sad fact of life is, that the company will still grind on without you. So take advantage of the chance to get away now, while you are still breathing.
Maybe after a short break, you will not have such a desire to strangle your co-workers.
You have a wonderful feeling in your heart. The problem is, you have trouble outwardly expressing all the feelings you have inside. After all the times you have been hurt, that is understandable.
You know that the person that is causing these feelings would really appreciate hearing how wonderful you feel. That person would be so grateful to hear of their importance in your life.
Given your past, though, it is no wonder why you feel so reserved. You know and understand and grasp the idea that positivity begets positivity. You know that declaring your love every day would only bring a stronger relationship, a more relaxed and stable bond, and would bring so much joy to the other person.
But you are still reserved. You do not wish to repeat the mistakes of the past.
You do realize, though, that the past is long gone. It is time to get busy living, or get busy dying. (With all apologies to Brooks Hatlen.)
Believe it or not, you can let yourself go without losing yourself. You can express what you feel inside without putting yourself at any more risk than you are now by being reserved. Heartache happens. Regardless of what you say or do not say. You should enjoy every moment, every relationship, every success, and every good feeling.
You know you should not hold back anymore. So don’t!
You are constantly racing, ever striving, seeking any possible way to move forward in life. You are working overtime, staying late, and going in early, all in the supposed pursuit of keeping your head above water and getting ahead. You are lying to yourself. You are doing it all because you know that the moment you stop, you will be confronted with the utter and complete futileness of your very existence. Your domestic expenses and surging credit debts are a signpost pointing at your many endeavors to fill the void you call a life.
Let off the gas pedal. Look around you. When was the last time you didn’t? Tomorrow, you should find a cloverfield. Not a giant movie monster, a literal field of clover. Do not do anything but breathe, and look, and breathe. Sweep away the thoughts that threaten to compel you back onto the rails of your fast moving death train, and look, and breathe, and look.
You will find it, and then, you can get back to digging that hole you call reality. The difference is that now, you will have a souvenir for your children to sell for 21 zlotys on ebay when you are dead.
You get angry. You cannot help that. There are thing in life that flip a switch inside your head and you just go nuts.
You cannot let frustration win. That is a silly concept. An inanimate, imaginary emotion defeating you and all that you are in a flash of raging blindness. You become the Hulk. (The angry stupid green Hulk, not the intelligent scientific Gray Hulk.) But you cannot help it. It is something that happens and afterwards you are left thinking, “Damn, what an asshole.”
For a brief period of time, you let some beast in the back of your head control you. You are better than that, and you know it.
Now you have to replace the mouse, the keyboard, and probably the desktop. Next time, you should take a deep breath and stay in control.
You cannot understand why no one else can get through a trip to the grocery store with as much poise and efficiency as you. It seems like everyone from the two gay guys trying to find the perfect wine for dinner to the little Asian woman who cannot reach the soy sauce, to the mother with her gaggle of loose and noisy children are all out to prevent you from getting in, getting your stuff and getting out.
What really pisses you off is when you have five items and want to use the self checkout lane. The problem is, they have three of the four lanes closed down, and the one lane that is open is clogged up with a fat lady with two shopping carts full of groceries, a book full of coupons, and she is paying with crinkled up dollars.
What is wrong with her?
This might seem like something for you to get upset about, but it illustrates a deeper lack of respect for mankind as a whole. Everyone is thinking about themselves and never taking into consideration that they are holding up everyone else. That’s not something you would do.
You were brought up right. You take other people into consideration when making choices like, “Should I clog up the Express Lane with my fifty frozen pizzas because technically it is only ONE item.”
You are far better than that.
There are times that you need to do big shopping and you are prepared for the adventure. You go, you fill up your cart, and you wait it out in the drudgery of the checkout line.
The day that everyone is as kind and considerate as you is the day mankind takes the next step in evolution.
