I didn’t expect it would come so quick, the day when I would be leaving my job for another place. I’ve been there for over two and a half years, it’s the longest amount of time I’ve ever been with any one single employer, and I thought I would stay there for a while longer yet. But something came along that I wasn’t expecting, and persisted through my long months of apathy, refusing to go away, even after the first contract acceptance date expired. I get the feeling it’s somewhere I’m meant to be, otherwise I’m sure it wouldn’t have worked out the way it did.

I came across a blog today by Marc Andreessen, he’s that guy that co-wrote the first internet browser that brought internet to the digital masses – that had a profound affect on my day. Two things in particular he said really struck a chord with me.

The second rule of career planning: Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

The issue is that without taking risk, you can’t exploit any opportunities.

That’s exactly what this next move felt like to me; I wasn’t doing it for the money or because I disliked my current job… that much. No it was more because this was an opportunity that I had never seen before, and if I didn’t take this, then maybe I would never see another one like it again. I don’t actually believe there is any such thing as a truly once in a lifetime opportunity, but one like this one I won’t see it’s equivalent in this time, or in this place, after it passes. It is a risk to move for me right now, I’m comfortable and the business model of my current company is sound, so money is coming in. This next place is an internet startup, so it might not be around in 4 years. If it is however, I’m going to do well financially, and if it isn’t, I’m still going to do well with the skills I’ll get out of it, but I’m going to have to find something else to pay my way with.

There used to be a time in life when I was pretty big on taking big risks, and with that came big rewards. My life is still a testament to those risks I took over 10 years ago; I’m living in Europe, living a life that is a dream to many others, and something only a handful of people will ever experience. The last couple of years though, I stopped taking risks, any risks, and I noticed that I started to stagnate. Life wasn’t going backwards, but it wasn’t going forwards either. It was sitting in an idle gear waiting for something to happen. That only ever results in days going by, and not much else. I’m not someone with a lot to protect, I’m not married, and I don’t have kids, so I can still go out there and take a risk and see what comes of it. In the end, I know I will always be alright, and I will always be able to get a job to pay the bills and put food on the table.

I feel more motivated now than I have in a long time. I felt excited today as I took the 20 minute slow walk from the office to my friends house where I was visiting. I started thinking of all the possibilities that lay before me, not just in the immediate future, but in the long term future that really is only in the realms of dreams. They didn’t seem so hazy, but a little more tangible, as if they were on the horizon of possibility.

Perhaps this is a moment I have been waiting for, but I just haven’t realised it yet. At the very least I am happy that now the world is turning in new and exciting ways. What will be the outcome? Well that is very much a blank page waiting for the hand of fate to begin writing.

Padwanna!

I've been here before; sitting at the start of the circle, or is it the end; trying to work out if it was the start of something new, or the end of something old. Is and end a new beginning; or is a beginning an end? Yes it is, no it's not; who the fuck can tell?!

Circles; cycles; patterns within a history. You tell me, is it the same as last time, or different, because I don't know any more?!

My friend tells me there is no such thing as true love, it's a western illusion, designed to make you spend money. But if this is true, why are there fairy tales, of knights in shining armour, crossing oceans, climbing mountains, and slaying dragons, all to be with the one they love?!

The power of love; the delusion of love; the myth of love. Who's to say, what's real and what's not! In the end, only your heart can tell you!

Padwanna!

In so many ways our lives are governed by the same forces that binds the universe together at its most basic level. Forces of attraction hold together subatomic particles that make up the substance of the physical world; of reality. Electrons spin around protons, held together by invisible bonds, which makes it very difficult for them to break free. But they can, usually when they achieve some state of high energy, and then the bonds will break in a very violent and destructive way.

Humanity is very much the same! As people we tend to group together, we find others who attract us, and we begin circling them, creating bonds of invisible force that hold us together. Over time these bonds can become very strong, and can be very hard to break. But it’s not impossible to break these bonds between people, but to do requires so much emotional energy that in the end, when someone is able to pull away – it is always with a tearing ripping explosion that is destructive to all who were caught up in it.

The law of attraction is a universal constant. We may try to deny ourselves on some intellectual level that this isn’t so, that we control who we are attracted to, and that we will control its power. However this is only the rational mind not wanting to accept that there are forces outside its own conscious control. But then there is so little that the rational mind can truly understand, because so much of our universe acts in a way that can’t be understood; both at a physical level, and also an emotional one. To try to understand – even a small amount of everything – only results in frustration.

I sometimes like to think of us – individuals – as being particles that are forever grouping together and flying apart through the emotional energy we apply to each other. Each time we are subjected to an emotional explosion we are sent spinning away from the person (or persons) we grouped with, and hurl through space for a while until we lose the high energy state we had, and we find someone else with whom a bond can be made, and the universal law of attraction begins again.

What I’d like to know, is if there is any purpose in the way this happens?

Padwanna!

Isn’t it funny how it’s the little things that always serve to remind us what matters most in our lives. I suppose that’s because the little things are always more subtle than big events in our lives, which have a tendency to overwhelm us and make us more disoriented at the time, rather than impart some wisdom. That tends to come later, after we’ve had time to digest the whole, and absorb the true meaning behind the events that we were caught up in. Very small moments, I’ve seen once again, can have as profound effect on us as anything large and overwhelming, we need only to keep our mind in the present to be sure that we don’t miss them.

I had one such moment this afternoon, well more like early evening, it was around 6.00pm and I was finishing up some work and most everybody else was leaving the office to start their personal lives again. One of the eastern european guys can by my area, sat down at the desk opposite me, and started some small chitchat. He told me that he was off to Luxembourg this weekend with his girlfriend because they were going celebrate being five years together. I told him how I was envious because I found Luxembourg to be a beautiful city, and I wasn’t doing anything quite so exotic. I asked him if his relationship was five years in a row, or was there some time off in the middle with breaks or split-ups. He answered that it was five years straight through, no time off. I found that pretty admirable, I’ve been five years with a woman as my longest relationship, but then there was 2 years apart throughout that period, which doesn’t really make it a proper five years. And then he said to me, you know, the biggest problem with going out with one person is that you’ll never get to have sex with someone else, all because of your conscience. Even though he’d like to, he said he couldn’t be with another woman because his fucking conscience would kick his ass, and that’s why he hated it. I thought about it, and chuckled, and had to agree with him. Conscience is a funny thing, because it’s totally a product of our environment, not anything else.

It was then that I started on a bit of a monologue, saying that most people only get to live in a very small environment because they never go beyond their own culture or place of upbringing, which means that their world view is very limited. That’s one of the intangible benefits of travelling, I continued, when you take yourself out of your own culture, your own home, away from your family and friends, you open yourself up to possibilities and experiences that you could never hope to have otherwise. In turn this broadens your world view and causes you to challenge everything that you know or think you know, and you become a better person for it. In the end, the only thing we take with us when it’s our turn to move to the next existence is the sum of our experiences. All our material possessions and money stay here, so the only thing of any true value is the experiences which we live.

As I finished my little rant, he sat there and didn’t say anything in reply, he simply was looking a little off to the side, and nodding his head. In the brief moment of silence between us, my own words resonated a chord within me, and I remembered what it was that made me want to leave my home and friends and family, and come to a place far far away, where everything was different, and every day would hold something new. This year in August will see me being a full 10 years away from home. It’s a long time, and over the last six months I have been questioning what I was doing here, because I had become very disoriented with the way my life had been going. But I see now that I wanted to be here doing this because every day is a new experience; an experience that I could never have had back home. I realise that I have grown a lot as a person, and that I am more than I could ever have been had I never had made the journey.

For the first time in a long time, I felt comforted, because I knew why I was here, and not somewhere else. It’s a nice feeling not to feel lost.

Padwanna!

Finally I’ve arrived at a point I have been trying to get to for what feels like ages; it’s time to get fucking serious; time to get out of this goddamned maudlin state I’ve been in for weeks on end and do something constructive! I have been reading back over my past few blogs and the tone is so bloody depressing, I was starting to get tired of myself and all this pitious crap I have been espousing. Yeah fair enough to go through a bit of a down spot – we all do at times – but yeah, also time to get the hell out of it and kick on into something new.

And you know, aint it funny how life gives you that push sometimes just when you need it.

As it turns out the impetus for this came yesterday morning when a friend of mine turned up on my doorstep with his backpack and 3 daypacks all filled with his stuff. Him and his dutch wife have decided to seperate for a while because their marriage is… well… fucked to put it mildly. Poor boy, hearing his story has really made me feel for the first time in a long time that my situation isn’t really all so bad, and that there are others out there with very real problems much larger than my own.

This mate is a fantastic artist though, and pretty soon he had his pencils and artist pad out on the kitchen table and he was drawing away. Therapy for him I suppose! The images are pretty intense, but I guess that’s normal for where he is. But as he was drawing my own creative juices started churning. As spliffs got passed around I began to work again on an old screenplay I had been writing, but had shelved a while back for no other reason than lifestyle apathy. It was then, in a haze of blue grey smoke that I saw that the reason I have been mister piss-on-everything is because I am just lacking direction and motivation for something really worthwhile and interesting. I think this is how it is for all creative people; if they aren’t working on something they tend to slip into these depressive states because they don’t have an outlet for all this energy that burns inside of them. It all became so clear to me. The purpose of life is to make our dreams come true!

Well for a lot of people the hard part is working out what your dream is. But not for me. I know that my biggest dream is to become a screenwriter and make cool movies. The other one is to own my own small publishing company, but I see this is being a part of this dream, so they are one in the same essentially. So I made the decision to get back into writing my screenplay and work every day towards becoming a fulltime screenwriter! Because I know doing this is the most worthwhile thing I can do with my life. And ultimately that is what is going to make me really happy.

Anyway, I have started a new blog to outline the beginning of this new road in my life. I’ve kinda fallen heavily in love with this blogging thing, so I want to keep a blog of the journey trying to acheive my lifes ambition. I have no idea what will happen, but at this stage, I don’t really care. All I know, I feel for the first time in fucking ages so full of energy and enthusiasm that this is really something right and good and worthy of everything I am!

God I love days like this. If only you could bottle this feeling and sell it; you’d make a million!

Padwanna!

Do you believe in fate, Neo?
No.
Why not?
Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.
Larry and Andy Wachowski, “The Matrix”

I have been thinking a lot about fate and my destiny over the last couple of months. There have been a number of things that have happened in life and invariably I find myself asking; what is the purpose to me being here, and is it fate that I am here in this place at this time? Yesterday while making coffee I think I found the answer to whether we live lives that are predetermined by fate, or whether we choose our own fate based on our free will.

My mum always used to talk about fate and destiny a lot, and say that things happen for a reason. That there was no such thing as a chaotic or random event in life. She’s a wise woman, my ole Ma, so I took a lot of her personal wisdom into my own world view. This thing about fate though is something that has always intrigued me. I used to believe that our paths in life were predestined to some extent, and that we were in preordained places at preordained times to make something happen. However the big realisation came when I was thinking about how we are all beings with our own free will. To have free will means that we are not automatons acting only according to some sort of genetic programming, like an ameoba (assuming an amoeba is just a single celled automaton and has no higher degree of self awareness that we know of). Our free will means we act according to our own desires which coalesce into action by creating forces of motivation within our hearts and minds. As our desires change, so to do our motivations, thus do our actions. So to be in possession of free will means that our destiny cannot be entirely predetermined. Because the only way for a higher power – like fate – to guarantee we will do something at a specific time and specific place is to remove free will from the beings in question. That way there is no random element that can screw things up. But since we do have free will, that means that, if there is a Fate, the best it can do is influence our desires to form a particular motivation that will coalesce into activity working towards a certain outcome that it desires!

Whether you believe in the bible or not – and I literally don’t to be honest – that story about Eve taking a bite from the apple on the tree of knowledge illustrates perfectly why Fate or Destiny is not absolute. She was told not to, and she did anyway! Regardless of some snake whispering in her ear, the chick went against the plan and altered her own destiny.

I feel like Neo in that I believe that we are masters of our own destiny, and we are not servants to some higher power. Whatever path we walk, we walk because we choose too, not because it has been chosen for us. And the only will that we need to contend with to acheive our dreams, is our own!

Padwanna!