"Understand that life is not a straight line. Life is not a set timeline of milestones. It is okay if you don’t finish school, get married, find a job that supports you, have a family, make money, and live comfortably all by this age, or that age. It’s okay if you do, as long as you understand that if you’re not married by 25, or a Vice President by 30 — or even happy, for that matter — the world isn’t going to condemn you. You are allowed to backtrack. You are allowed to figure out what inspires you. You are allowed time, and I think we often forget that. We choose a program right out of high school because the proper thing to do is to go straight to University. We choose a job right out of University, even if we didn’t love our program, because we just invested time into it. We go to that job every morning because we feel the need to support ourselves abundantly. We take the next step, and the next step, and the next step, thinking that we are fulfilling some checklist for life, and one day we wake up depressed. We wake up stressed out. We feel pressured and don’t know why. That is how you ruin your life. You ruin your life by choosing the wrong person. What is it with our need to fast-track relationships? Why are we so enamored with the idea of first becoming somebody’s rather than somebodies? Trust me when I say that a love bred out of convenience, a love that blossoms from the need to sleep beside someone, a love that caters to our need for attention rather than passion, is a love that will not inspire you at 6am when you roll over and embrace it. Strive to discover foundational love, the kind of relationship that motivates you to be a better man or woman, the kind of intimacy that is rare rather than right there. “But I don’t want to be alone,” we often exclaim. Be alone. Eat alone, take yourself on dates, sleep alone. In the midst of this you will learn about yourself. You will grow, you will figure out what inspires you, you will curate your own dreams, your own beliefs, your own stunning clarity, and when you do meet the person who makes your cells dance, you will be sure of it, because you are sure of yourself. Wait for it. Please, I urge you to wait for it, to fight for it, to make an effort for it if you have already found it, because it is the most beautiful thing your heart will experience. You ruin your life by letting your past govern it. It is common for certain things in life to happen to you. There will be heartbreak, confusion, days where you feel like you aren’t special or purposeful. There are moments that will stay with you, words that will stick. You cannot let these define you – they were simply moments, they were simply words. If you allow for every negative event in your life to outline how you view yourself, you will view the world around you negatively. You will miss out on opportunities because you didn’t get that promotion five years ago, convincing yourself that you were stupid. You will miss out on affection because you assumed your past love left you because you weren’t good enough, and now you don’t believe the man or the woman who urges you to believe you are. This is a cyclic, self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t allow yourself to move past what happened, what was said, what was felt, you will look at your future with that lens, and nothing will be able to breach that judgment. You will keep on justifying, reliving, and fueling a perception that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. You ruin your life when you compare yourself to others. The amount of Instagram followers you have does not decrease or increase your value. The amount of money in your bank account will not influence your compassion, your intelligence, or your happiness. The person who has two times more possessions than you does not have double the bliss, or double the merit. We get caught up in what our friends are liking, who our significant others are following, and at the end of the day this not only ruins our lives, but it also ruins us. It creates within us this need to feel important, and in many cases we often put others down to achieve that. You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how, you love. There is courage in that. You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you innately desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside of you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. The next Michelangelo could be sitting behind a Macbook right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life." (COPIED FROM A FRIEND - Author Unknown)

tribe.vibes.

Outside the wind is rushing fiercely. The wind chimes from the neighbor's breezeway and the rustling of leaves are all I hear, as I rest my bones in solitude inside my minuscule dwelling. This spot on earth that I have carved out for myself is all I have to keep me grounded most days. Just like the wind outside, the winds of change are blowing thru my life relentlessly. I try to enjoy the ride, but to worry over that which is uncertain is as common to me as breathing air. I count back the years since I left home and I think of how each year has proved to be so different from the last. I never imagined my life would be this way. Not all good. Not all bad. It makes me anxious to wonder what will unfold next, but I am the master of that destiny. I guess I forget sometimes that I choose what happens next. It's the people tho... they can't be controlled. I can't always pick who will remain on cast. But I trust the universe knows best, therefore I will go forward living by this truth; this quote that resounds in my head lately: "your vibe attracts your tribe."

synchronicity.

So a hot homeless crackhead showed up at my door about two hours ago. He woke me from sleep with his knocking, so I let him in like an idiot. He fell asleep beside me. I didn't sleep but I just thought about how I get myself into shit like this. So then I showered and freshened up while he snoozed. Then I roused him and told him he had to go. I grilled him on how his life led him to this point, while he asked if he could have a tshirt. In a stroke of irony, the first shirt I pulled out was my Habitat For Humanity shirt. It fit him perfectly. :)

this.my.daily.prayer.

Knowing he is well and flourishing is enough. To wish for more, to wish for him close to me is selfish. I am satisfied with the knowledge that he is alive and flourishing. The rest is up to the universe.

tapestry.

I stretch myself across the bed, more disheveled than the bedding embracing my slump. The same bedding which has become all too familiar with how ineffective I can be as I sleep the days away when loneliness comes to visit. Unable to lift my heavy flesh off the bed, I somehow find the energy to move my right arm. Without a plan in mind, my arm snakes itself to my nightstand, as I watch with the half of my face which is not crammed into a pillow. My fingers join the fun as they spring to life the motions necessary to open the top drawer. The hand I once controlled, now with a mission apart from my mission of slumber, forces itself thru the trenches of socks and sleeping pill bottles to gain access to the rear of my nightstand drawer. Then it stopped abruptly, signaling success in the search, and retreated. I pull out the empty cologne bottle I have carried from state to state, residence to residence. With my thumb I force the top from the cylinder bottle and pull it to my face for a whiff. As I drew into my nostrils the faint fragrance that resonated in the corners of this aged cylinder, tears began to drip down my cheek while the memories of a happier time came together like dozens of little puzzle pieces to paint the tapestry of love lost.