motivation

How to Change Your Life

A part of me is completely conflicted about desiring to write an inspirational post. This isn’t about the 3 Ways To Easily Lose Weight or The Secret Preventing Your Happiness. It’s about identifying the elements in personal growth.

Generally, these are long term changes. This entails a combination of:

  • time
  • discipline
  • consistency

With the nearly infinite amount of positivity blogs, inspiration hype, and self-help hoopla to go around, they nearly always revolve around these concepts.

Kind of like how all these lose-weight-fast ads come with an asterisk that say, “Regular exercise and proper diet for maximum results”. Well, if you worked out and ate healthy already, you probably wouldn’t need the quick-fix!
Ok sure, there are some problems where it’s necessary but I’m specifically talking about the “do it quick” type of things.

The funny thing is, this isn’t anything magical. We already know what to do! We just get lost in the games we play in our head. Turns out, some things are fairly simple. Getting a salad instead of fries is easy. All it takes is a simple sentence. Hitting the gym instead of being lazy  is easy. All it takes is a bit of effort.

The problem with reading all this inspiration-porn is that reading is incredibly fast. Just this sentence took you less than 10 seconds to read. On the other hand, committing to change your habits can take a month to kick in. That’s helluva lot more time than the 5 minutes to read this piece. So to truly benefit from this writing you must do more than play along idealizing your own self-growth. The entire point of this piece is to remind you those dreams don’t need to stay in your head. They don’t end after my last word. You carry your dreams forward.

To truly benefit from this piece of writing you must internalize and resonate with these ideas and follow through.

FOLLOW THROUGH.

Don’t just fantasize, actualize! Make it happen. Do it. Do it before your excuses make sense. Do it before your day ended. Do it before problems get so bad you hate yourself for not handling them earlier.

We all know you can do it — so why are you hesitating?

Set Your Sails

I didn’t always have the confidence
To stand up tall for my own stance
Only giving ground to external forces
As if my soul wasn’t mine and wasn’t even worth it
Not worth the fight of choosing to live right
Where I fell out of light and into more vice
As if insatiable addiction could suffice
To be a life to live, just a roll of the dice

Yet one day I looked in the mirror  and saw the picture clearer
Saw my own chin rise up
As if confidence was the direction of a head held high
Fueled by the dreams as vast as the sky
You see, it took me some time to truly believe
That in my own hands, my own mind
I too have this power to shine
Power to grow and become one step further
One bit stronger
A future to nurture
No longer in search of sweet salvation
No longer procrastinating the most important sensation

The feeling of living by one’s own side
Not just running from problems, for there’s no need to hide
Letting fear and doubt come but then it subsides
Living a life of love, not one of lies

—

This last Thursday, I went to my college’s poetry club for the first time. I wrote this piece for the prompt:

Something that took you a long time to believe in

—

Photographer: Kelly Sikkema

 

Grow Everyday


You don’t need more time
You just need to live it
Stop putting off your growth
As if this is your limit
You can do so much more
Just breathe and believe
That you can still rise up off the floor
I know you feel hurt, I know you feel torn
But that’s just what you get since the day you were born

This life is ultimately not of your deciding
But remember the power in your own hands to create
No, not in the future, but here on this day
Today we live in our own way, not afraid
No longer too scared to live it brave
Now stronger than yesterday
The dues that we just have paid
Give us what we have today

So help me make a better tomorrow
Where instead of choosing a life fueled off of our sorrow
Let’s choose one of love
No longer letting pain remain the status-quo
Hand in hand, let’s truly grow
Let’s come to know
That we exist together in this shared show
Each playing our own part, our own role

—

Photographer: Jamie King

Gateway to Emotion

Trying to slow down and prevent time from moving so fast
Day after day just simply pass
Given several moments to be aware of the ride
Existing in time and space with a heart open wide
Aware of the fact that what we are is more than just what’s inside
Loves, fears, and pains we hide

Living in the age of anxiety, uncertainty
Born with the notion that we can live free
Overwhelmed with emotion, just ever so briefly
That we can grow as a collective humanity
Undiscovered, remain the depths of our sanity

Bringing back the awareness, the mindfulness
A receptive experience of one particular happenstance
Thrown into a world already in existence

With the power of our brains to convert light into meaning
It is us, with perception, that give the Universe feeling
So let us do more and truly start believing
That with our hands, we craft life into being

—
Photographer: Moyan Brenn

Don’t Tell Me You’re Stuck

Wake up from denial
Open your eyes as it’s been a while
Been a bit of time since you last cleared your mind
Of all your self doubts, worries, and binds
Self created shackles, illusions of a kind
Where instead of living free, you chose to live it blind

Forgetting that whether or not you choose to act
Time continues its march forward, never going back
No more repeats or second chances, let’s pick up the growing slack

I know this failure hurts, but it can be oh! much worse
For if you do nothing but sit by and curse
You’ll take it to the grave, from this chair to your hearse
For this reason alone, I write you this verse

Don’t tell me you’re stuck, give it a different name
Shift your perspective to one embracing change
Let this directive flow through your growing brain
You have the power to love, live and be brave
So keep moving forward, day after day

—

Photographer: Matthew Wiebe

All in a Moment


Here we are on this journey
This bittersweet mix of joys and of worries
Some slow-paced but many hurried
Heads buried in flurries of distractions
Valueless stimulation stealing our time in fractions

Little moments to never again be retrieved
Let’s make them count, instead of failing to see
That this is our life
A chance to love and be free
Not just miserably
But with a head held tall
With a sense of awareness for what we know above all

That the galactic process begun eons ago
Had never really ended, we are still the show
The show of life, the days and nights
Wrongs and rights
Pulsations of lights against the darkness
Suffering amid this one bliss

Here in this moment exists our awareness
The heartbeat of a Universe with a second to witness
The magic and wonder of knowledge without limits

Surrounded by patterns of some known but many not
Where the answers remain elusive in our ever-dynamic plot
In a temporary world condemned to be forgot
And yet here we are, able to give all we’ve got

—
Photographer: Keith Misner

Time to Live

It’s time to begin
Time to bring together the lost pieces
The ones flustered in disarray
Spread out in a land of pure dismay
Where we were too afraid to live it brave

It’s time to release the tension
Been in class for so long, but never got the lesson
That it’s better to be and let be
Than cling to the depressing feeling of self pity
Feeling shitty
Self induced chains restraining the growth within me
Preventing me from finding the strength to sing free

Once disconnected in reflections of fear from imperfections
Let me cast away the state of mind that can’t hear this message
All you have is one life, make it fun and live it right
You won’t always know what that means but you will definitely feel it
This moment reveals it
No more illusions to conceal it
Awaken to the love and let your heart wield it

Express yourself and let love flow through
Grow, grow, grow as you become you
Before our days are done, there are moments to renew
We’ll likely never know all of what is true
But this music sounds so good, and oh! what a view

I’m Disappointed and Here’s What You Need to Do

Open your eyes and see the projects you’re denying
Letting them shrivel up and face the threat of dying
You haven’t worked hard enough to secure these dreams of your mind
So start moving already and begin making use of your time

You already know these kinds of days won’t last
The clocks move the same but each second’s too fast
Leisure not worth the price of letting dreams pass
So start paying attention and get off your ass

I know there are unanswered questions outstanding
But trust me on this, it takes some understanding
That none of it exists, your time just a series of blips
Wibbly-wobbly bits of information
Stored in symbolic logic for mental integration
With many unknowns still due an explanation
So don’t get too caught up trying to escape our situation

Instead, dive in and become fully aware
No longer blind to the love in the air
Notice it here, feel it there
Start finding your reasons to care
Reasons to share a life worth living
A hero who knows that this is the way
Living with love, making use of each day
Knowing that it’ll pass regardless what we say
So let’s make a past worth remembering today

I love you and only wish for you to grow
Just trust me on this, for I definitely do know
That the hype is real, the potential in your heart is truly surreal
Melting into emotional journeys of free will
The power you have can still become a force to be reckoned with
The power of the hero not just held in myth
But in the way your soul moves forward
Moving towards a day that you believe in
Aiding dreams that need relieving
Bringing oxygen to struggling lungs that keep on breathing
Able to become more than expected, don’t ever stop dreaming

Live Undivided


Close your eyes
Breathe in
Breathe out
Other distractions you can live without
As you already know the next step
The path only appears forked to those with hesitation left

Open your heart and truly listen
To the rhythm of the world
A life that glistens
Accept your pains and begin dismissing
States of mind which cloud your vision
Become aware of the illusion of division
Between the Universe and you, there is no fission

—
Photographer: Joe Parks

Onward to 2015!

What a year it has been!

I’ve grown a lot more comfortable opening up and expressing my thoughts here. Coming to the realization that the words themselves do not matter as much as the emotion or meaning they aim to convey. Much like how a photograph fails to portray the stunning fluidity of a river, each poem is an attempt to take a snapshot of flowing water. Though the words themselves continue to exist, they are evidence of something much more. I could never fully recreate a poem word for word — as that moment has already passed with a new one to replace it.

I’d like to share my most viewed and enjoyed posts from 2014:

These are my stepping stones towards a dream of mine. I would love to somehow end up as a song writer and there’s no better way to start than by pumping out poems.

Once again, thank you for reading, writing, liking, and viewing. Your support is what keeps my blog alive.

Here’s to 2015! Let’s make it a good one!