LONG IS THE ROAD...

TACTICAL

In case anyone has been wondering…

I will be a full-time student working part-time!  I am only taking two classes but the time I will be putting into the courses allows me to be considered a full-time student… and who would have thought I would ever be a full-time student of ANYTHING back in 2007?

“Probie” had her “scholarship offer” revoked near the end of September.  I hadn’t mentioned it before because it wasn’t worth mentioning.  After a year of little growth, our relationship became incompatible with our individual goals.  Rather than have our inevitable break down draw out, I told her that I could not continue to see her.  The relationship had become stagnant, and I felt that I needed the space to pursue my personal goals.

One of the things that my meeting with the academic advisor did was enlighten me on how I have fallen off the pace that I had hope to set.  Between struggles with math classes and time out for unforeseen circumstance, I am not where I had hoped to be at this time.  But you know what..?  I am cool with it.  None of the delays were either avoidable on my part, nor have they been from a lack of effort either and, perhaps, this is simply the pace that I am able to matriculate through college.  Anywho, though I will be making every attempt to get to where I am going, I am happy with how far I have gotten through school, through life, thus far.

WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT ..?

I have been telling myself that I have to be harder on myself (...because your enemy will be) and not let myself slip into self-satisfaction.  The temptation to relax and accept the current appearance of stability is there… but there is so much more to accomplish and greater glories to be attained.  The road always looks long when you are standing in the same place, so it is best to keep it moving.

A piece of internet wisdom that I found relevant to my general life strategy, “Breaking through levels of disbelief-  Learning something could be done, not how to do it.  How to make tangible what no one else is doing” (or even it they are, still doing your thing anyway!!).  When I saw that sentence, especially the “breaking through levels of disbelief”, it really struck a familiar chord in me, one that I would apply to past relationships, and, or so I believe, is relevant to present and future relationships as well.

The mind will achieve what it can perceive… and I know that  my ex-wife, Mookie Dee, and Princess, simply couldn’t see it with me.  That is why I was not affected as much by the latter two fails as much as one would have supposed.  But it also plays a role in my primary personality traits with the same, if not greater, effect.

I have been diagnosed as disabled for nearly ten years now and I still have the first memories of what I thought after I was told.  At various times throughout my life previous to the finding of my injury, I had begun to track the patterns of my life and how I could alter them.  This included an inventory of who I was and my own awareness of self and the world around me in a macro and micro sense of perception.  So I took the scribblings that I had been making (including my “Rules To Live By”) and I begin to collate them into “listicles” and kept them together for reference purposes.

Having begun this “preparation” of sorts  long before my diagnosis, I actually felt that I was prepared to live through this trauma (what, you DON’T think being told that your brain is permanently damaged isn’t traumatic..?).  I felt fortunate that I had stumbled across the information that I did, as well as when, that motivated me to think about the consequences of my boxing career.  Enough talk of the relative long ago… because I am currently --

IN THE HERE AND NOW

Anything is possible if you believe it is-- and you are willing to sacrifice and work as hard as you have to for it.  When I decided to add the “Tactical” section to my journal entries, it was thinking ahead to the time where I would find myself less concerned with life’s complexities and the common mendacities of being when I thoroughly believe that the answers to my life, individual, lie on a higher plane of thought and perception.

When I was a child and would read about how the ancient scholars spent their lives in a seeming endless search of knowledge and spiritual growth, there was the flash that this could be the path for me.  Then came Howie from the television show, “The Fall Guy” and his piecemeal college career.  When you take in how early these impressions were made and if you KNOW me, then you look differently at my wanderings, the ups and the downs of my life.  I know that I feel like I have lived the life that I have earned, period.  It is this conceit that drives my being and makes me believe in myself the way that I do.  When I say my regrets are few, I mean EXACTLY that.  I don’t hang words on my life carelessly, so I don’t have many things to look back on and say, “Mark, I don’t think you should have done that there… don’t you wonder what things would have been like had you not..?”  If this is the story that I have told myself over and over, that I am not a victim of circumstance but one of my own lapses in judgement, why would you think that after reaching this point again in my life, I would be willing to question the process that has led me to where I am now?  The rules that have brought me here have affirmed their use.