Enlightenment.....or something

     My father is a buddhist. My mother spent much of my life telling me that God doesn't exist because too many bad things happen to good people and God (as she believes he should be) would never allow bad things to happen so, he must not exist. 

    When I was 5, my mother remarried my stepfather who is a non-attending Catholic. The rest of my family, as far back as I can remember, are Methodist and that is the religion I grew up attending. The church building was big...I mean really huge!! We only attended that one because my mother had a degree in music and the church which we attended had the best music program around. This program was led, I was told, by someone who was considered to be one of the best choir directors anywhere. Every Christmas Eve we would sing songs from Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, ending with a lighted candle for everyone. Then we would go home and open one present.

    There are so many ideas about how religion should or should not exist. So many people decide that if you don't believe the way they do, you must be evil. I can't imagine a God that would see any of his children as evil. When my kids were young, I would go out of my way to correct their actions and be ridiculously careful not to tell them that they were bad but that the actions that caused whatever incident were poorly chosen. I, however, got the "normal" raising that clearly stated I was bad if I chose something for which my parents disapproved or especially the community.
    I do believe there are "right and wrong" choices. I don't believe there are right and wrong people. In my current personal belief system, I feel we are spirit children of a Heavenly being that watches over us always. Bad things do happen, because that same loving parent who lets us make choices, gives everyone that same freedom to make choices. 

    We don't always make decisions beneficial for other's lives...in fact I think it is impossible to do that for everyone all the time. The time when a choice becomes "poor" is when that particular choice is permanently harmful or detrimental to ourselves or another person.

    I'm going to forgo my deeper thoughts on this (like when is a good time to go to war, for example) and stick with the surface issues like day in and day out simple choices. These can be detrimental enough.
    Religion can help us with boundaries. Some are more strict than others but they all provide something for someone. I have always believed in the existence of a God, a supreme being, if you will, who watches over us and guides us if we will simply listen. The multiple, daily choices we make are the foundation of our entire lives....like a gauge, they measure our progress. 

    Depending on the choices WE make, we lean toward happiness or misery. If we compare our choices to our current religious belief's dictates, we have a gauge of our chosen happiness. Let me clarify here....whatever we believe in is "our religion." Or another way to see it would be, wherever we spend most of our energy, what we give most of our money to or what we spend the majority of our daily hours thinking about IS OUR RELIGION. For some, these things change many times throughout each day and those are some of the most unhappy people I have ever met!
    I do not believe we are in this life to find the one right religion but to find the path that will lead us to happiness and joy. That looks different for everyone of us. For some, a specific religious belief is a foundation for that joy. When we can find happiness in someone else's happiness, it says something about our foundational belief, that we know we are part of the human team. And, I believe, we are all part of a human team....in one form or another.

Where are we today...

    I've been saying for some time now, Trump is either going to ruin us or change things just enough to wake us up. Conspiracy theories aside, our government has, for generations, slowly taken away rights and privileges of the basic countryman....all in the name of protection. If anyone doesn't realize we're already in a police state, they are blessed NOT to be harassed! It doesn't take much to notice if you read just about any news article describing happenings in the world.

    Please understand, many of the current news stories (or something like them) have been happening for generations upon generations and it is only occasionally that they escalate to the extreme level of out right despotism. We are all human after all. The thing is, most of the occurrences were preventable, or at least minimizable. The powers that be find that their power is intoxicating and the smart ones begin to tighten the noose while distracting their victims with tempting desirables. If someone starts blowing their cover, they just create doubt about that individual or their theories. Think, "These aren't the droids you're looking for." We, as citizens, are so comfortable in our day to day lives that we either choose to not believe it even though it's right under our noses or we just choose to look the other way claiming, "I can't fix it so why bother.""It's too big for just one person." or (within our own heads)"I don't want to look like a fool to everyone else."

    I have no idea what Trump's actual plan is. Maybe that's the way he wants it. Maybe he is a genius that is going to take over the world and we are all going to be played as fools. Maybe he will start WWIII or just create such a broken economy that we become the subjects of another country. Maybe he will strengthen the economy so much we all become richer or (more likely) the economy is strengthened for only the elite few who can consider Trump to be their peer. With this last one I would guess that the elite would not want us to become subjects of some other country...at least I would hope not....of course all bets are off if it would benefit them financially.

    When we look back on these years, will we find the beginnings of a positive major change for our country or will we find the seeds of our destruction? Will time tell us?

This is my personal concern!

I hate politics as much as anyone. I'm not unique in this view. We seem to have come to a place where most feel we either take a stance or allow "bad things" to happen!

Trump won the presidency. It is Nov 14, 2016 and the whole country is up in arms about what we should do. Many are comparing his triumphant election to Hitler's rise to power.

Some feel he is the next Hitler. (except Hitler was a genius, albeit made an abundant amount of evil choices, in my opinion) I feel Trump is neither "evil" nor a genius, however, I fear his future actions could become evil. I don't personally believe his intellect will change much if any.
Some feel he will change our country for the better. I believe he will definitely make changes....not sure yet if they will be for the betterment of the people as a whole but, for sure, for Trump and his kind.

The Obama administration, and prior admins, have put in place the perfect tools for Trump's dictatorship. The government has the power to delve into the life of anyone they want....and now Trump has that power in the palm of his hand. 

We will now see the US being freed from the oppression of the past overseers, and diving headlong into the next, albeit different, dictator. 

I feel that this time it won't be as obvious as was Hitler's regime.

When life throws you to the world....I mean the wolves

     There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to some events in a person's life. No one lives very long without some kind of disaster permeating every aspect of daily living. Some have unbelievably difficult circumstances and others have seemingly no problems whatsoever. Sometimes I think the more difficult lives are the ones in which no problems are obvious. Those problems are subtle and easily brushed aside.         The most difficult problems to understand, at least for me, are the ones that are against the innocent, especially children. Taking into account that at some point we are no longer children, one might wonder when innocence is no longer a factor.
     I'm not sure how many people would argue that a newborn isn't innocent but what about a two year old.  Don't we usually talk about the "terrible twos" as being a time when children begin to "cause" problems?  So maybe 2 years old is when we begin to not be innocent.
    Then around the age of 13 we start to discover our bodies.....and notice other's as well (unless, of course, we are in a family that is prominent in the sexual innuendos, then this can start way earlier). Is that when we lose innocence? For some, that is a whole new world in which we can finally feel like we begin to understand what the world is constantly shoving in our faces through media and group discussions.

     Next we find ourselves at the age of having children.  At this point much of our innocence, or shall we start to call it naïveté, is lost to parenthood and the realization that our parents weren't so far off (unless they were). Children challenge you no matter how many you have(1, 3, 12). I am speaking here of people children, not puppies or kittens. I always felt "my mom must love me" but I also wondered if she loved her dogs more than she loved her children....they WERE her children of choice after all and that fact was never too far from lips. 

    That aside, we all have lessons we learn from having children, even if we desert them, there will always be that nagging in the back of our minds of how we should or should not have done something. They are the biggest learning curve of all! More naïveté is lost here than at any other time in our lives.
After kids, it's all downhill from there.....or is it?
    Then you watch your kids in their grown lives, especially when you had previously patted yourself on the back at the wonderful job you did as a parent. I mean you gave them EVERYTHING about yourself, sacrificed sleep, food, clothing, cleanliness and every other aspect of your individuality only to watch them be adults and you start to wonder about your parenting skills after all. 

    Sometimes they never figure it out, and other times they act according to your teachings. And there it is!!! Your realization that it wasn't yourself you should have focused on. They are adults now. Capable of making choices all on their own, making mistakes, fixing them and also making choices that bless the lives of so many others. 

    These are now individuals you had no concept of when you were teaching them to read. You realize that it mattered how you gave them your time, yes, but the biggest loss of innocence is when you let go of your children and truly support them to make THEIR OWN choices, "right" or "wrong."  
    That's not innocence, you say, that's naïveté! Well, maybe, but think about this. How old do we have to be before we are considered naive instead of innocent? Judgements rule our day. Maybe we all have a bit of both and the confusion turns us against ourselves. Maybe we are all a bit naive so we make naïve mistakes from innocent actions...or vice versa. For some, maybe we never lost part of our innocence, no matter what happens in our lives.

Life IS experience!

    I believe we all come to this earth with a purpose, a mission, if you will. Of course, to understand where I'm coming from, you have to believe in an existence before and after this earthly life. Bringing that into the conversation one might see everything as choices we make. Before we came, what if we chose to live through certain difficulties to learn particular attributes. We may have chosen to come to a specific family that would provide these difficulties. Or we might have chosen to come to a particular era so that we would have to live through famine, war or other atrocities. Maybe we came to the perfect family where everything went "according to plan" so that we could learn more subtle things like sympathy for others, or even, having much we could learn to give much. There are endless possible ideas here of course.

    With all of this, we still have the ability to choose what we learn. The book by Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning contains his observances of watching others deal with the ravages of a concentration camp. Of course, this is all while he is living in this hell himself. He noticed that the people who shared what they had, fared better emotionally. Not everyone can stay chipper through this kind of difficulty but even when faced with one small crust of bread every few days, some would share it with others who needed it more. Of course, they all "needed" it so I'm not sure that was the "right" way to phrase it but these people did better overall. 

    By the end of the containment, when they were rescued by friendly soldiers, these people were able to make a new life. Most of the others were not. Many killed themselves because they couldn't live with the nightmares of what, to them, was nothing but intolerable experiences. Positive actions created possibilities and in turn gave some hope but they had to create that hope for themselves in a situation that was impossible to most views.
    If we look at innocents who are acted upon then we have to ask, "What about their choices?" If we totally ignore the idea of them making choices before this earthly life, we could wonder, what if they had the opportunity for forgiveness at the highest level. Putting it in my opinion, I do believe that there is nothing more wrong than hurting an innocent, and by innocent I mean children. I really don't feel I have all the answers, nor do I believe I have all the answers but I do believe that there is a higher plan than we can understand at this time. 

    I would like to know the answers someday. I keep searching for them and maybe I will discover some of them. Until then I choose to believe that there is hope for each one of us no matter what we choose to think, believe or do. By hope I mean a positive outcome....whatever that means for us as individuals.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes(started Aug 2013)

I was going to name this one, "The poison in my life" but I like the song better! :)  It has a more positive quality to it and that is where I am trying to be!

    When I was 2, my mother left my dad and moved to Hawaii. According to her, we had a two room hut and lived just off a ditch. I don't remember much about that time in my life but it has been a source of some problems that I have only recently been introduced to.
    I don't believe we have to know all the things that affected us to be able to let them go but this one was a turning point for me. There were lots of things that happened during that time but one big one was a boyfriend of my mom who (according to my mom) loved me more than he loved her so she couldn't marry him. 

    Now, I had no reason to disbelieve my mom's story until recently. My journey to clean up my disproportionate thinking has brought me to some realizations of some things I was taught by my mother. I've worked past the physical abuse, slogged through some of the mental abuse and learned to love myself just as I am (despite the fact my mom believed I was a punishment from something horrible she did in a past life). 

    Though I always knew she had self esteem issues, I never really understood how that was forced on me until I started looking at the some of my mom's parenting practices that I was led to believe were loving. The song, "You and Me Against the World" by Helen Reddy was "our song." As a 2 year old that is a lot of responsibility! I wasn't old enough to be in the equation. I should have been being taken care of instead of relied on. It was painted as a place of honor. I've decided it was not an honor I no longer want to keep up with it.

    She spent many hours trying to be a better mother to me than she had for herself....at least in her eyes. (I didn't see my grandmother as just an old person trying to get into heaven.) Much of what my mother did, she said would better my life. Too much of it was how she wanted things for herself (things she felt were missing in her childhood) but she left out so many of the things I needed to actually feel the love she said she was showing me. 

    Oh, I knew she loved me, in her own way. Now that my kids are grown, I look back and wonder how many times that my sacrificed needs to give them what they said they wanted, were really understood by them? Or was I just passing buck. My kids are all different than me and not one of them gets me, like I felt like I got my Grammie.
    One thing is certain, my kids all knew they were loved....or at least...they say they always knew I loved them. It was the same thing I told my mother when asked that question.

Being responsible for.....

    It's funny how many stories I hear about some amazing choice some person made only to realize that if that person had failed they would have been considered an idiot for even attempting...whatever they happened to succeed in doing. Then, I hear about someone doing something and all the "judges" out there who wonder why that person even attempted trying to do something so incredibly stupid! If they had succeeded......it would have been courageous, amazing or daring. 

    Who is responsible when someone does something....and fails? At what point do we get to make our own stupid choices? Whose life am I living anyway? Where do the lines of our dumb choices not being allowed to affect others need to be drawn legally? At what level do we become incapable and need to be forced to do the right thing?
    Don't get me wrong. I think there should definitely be laws, but at what level do laws become needful and don't actually cross boundaries of our freedom to choose for ourselves? I personally have lots of opinions on this and I won't list them but suffice it to say, we grow throughout our lives changing our ideas of what is disturbing to others when it comes to our actions. 

    Some laws are truly intrusive and others are for the betterment of the people as a whole. I do believe this. I, however, feel that once we are considered an adult, we should be allowed to make those decisions for ourselves.
    Of course, one can make the argument that if we aren't taught what being responsible means as we grow into said adulthood, then we can't very well make those decisions AS an adult now can we? Hence we have many laws making sure we wear seat belts, helmets and don't mow our yards before 8am(at least in suburbia). All our choices affect others. From the very act of breathing, we are affecting other people.
    Parenting has to be the most prominent in this area. What other job affects others more than parenting a child? Your choices affect that child and from there the effect continues exponentially. For good or ill, we will always(childless or not) affect others. 

    It's about time we realize how much, even in the simplest of actions, we affect those around us. Not to stress us out but to recognize, and be responsible for our part in the good(or bad) of everything that happens around us throughout our lives!