Journeys

I awake this morning angry and resentful. I have this uncomfortable tightness in the pit of my stomach. I partly know who I am angry at and why, and partly my reaction is an over reaction. First of all I am always angry at myself when I wake up. I am angry at where I am in my life and the bad choices I made to get me here. Now many people will say “don’t beat yourself up” “you didn’t do anything wrong” “you can’t feel guilty”. Here is the thing I don’t feel guilty. You see my friends and family are confusing my honest assessment of what I did and my anger at myself with guilt. Let me elaborate. If someone told you that there was a speed trap on a certain road that you travel everyday and you went speeding through that area and got a ticket how should you feel? Should you blame the police officer? Should you blame God? Should you curse your bad luck? How about the next day, when you went blasting through that same 35mph zone, this time going 60mph. How should you feel? Should you say “pity me, feel bad for me, nothing ever goes my way, I never catch a break”. How about when on the 3rd day you are pulled over again, and this time the police officer doesn’t give you a ticket but sends you to traffic school to get help for your speeding problem. And how should you feel when after 1 month you have accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in tickets, lost your license, and so on. Well where I am in my life is a place that I landed because I ignored everything I knew and now I am paying the consequences. So I am angry at myself. Very angry. I am infuriated. I made choices that I knew would cost me in the future. I choose to accumulate debt that I could not payoff in a million lifetimes by living beyond my means. The sad part is I have no fancy cars or tvs or jewels. All the debt I accumulated was for a “lifestyle”. Eating in restaurants, shopping at Walmart , nonsense just nonsense, junky stuff that had no value always pinching pennies only to have nothing in the end. It wasn’t the first time I had dug myself a hole by using credit to “live”. It was the third. I crawled out of the hole the first 2 times working 2 and 3 jobs and living like a monk. But this time that wasn’t an option. That is only one example of the bad decisions I made over the last six years that caused me to be living in a difficult situation. As I write this I am angry at myself for still whining and complaining. As I said before really my life is not all that bad. I mean my goodness, I am sitting here at my kitchen table(which came from a garbage heap) typing on a laptop( one of the things I was able to keep from better times) in a fairly safe apartment(although paying the rent month to month is a struggle). I know I will have access to food today, and so will my children. I know my life is better than millions of people today. And I think that is why I am really angry at myself, because I know it in my head but in my heart, my soul, the pit of my stomach it isn’t enough, I want more. Why? Why do I always want more? Is it really me who wants more? Or is it the me that has been programmed by my environment to want more, bigger and better? And if it is the decades of American brainwashing that tells me I can’t be happy with so little how do I undo that message? How do I tune out the entire philosophy of my generation and culture? How do I free myself? Because really in the end I just want to be free from this false desire to have a bunch of stuff. So on today’s journey I will seek better choices, I will seek to be free of predetermined outcomes. I will seek to leave the anger behind, and maybe I can chose not to be angry just for a little while.

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