Given Thanks...

Our lives are shaped by the experiences we have. These experiences we have attribute itself to the development of our inner core. Our inner core is how other people will define us. More importantly, our inner core is what will make us, us. For these experience, we are thankful.

Here is a story.

"From the clouds to the water to the garbage in the street, everything is absolutely beautiful."

"People are really calm and live life to enjoy it, despite any hardships."

"Hardships are redefined."

"I think there is a lot of hope".

"One of Gods CHildren."

"I have also seen alot of beautiful souls that I will appreciate forever."

"Key to success: ability to understand people".

"You learn the most when your losing".

YO SOY UN GUARDIAN.

I have grown so much from this trip. Before, I took alot for granted. I realize I live life with alot of assumptions. I automatically thought life was good for everyone and that most of my problems were monumental. In reality, people in the world have problems: death, starvation, parent-less, on a daily basis.

"Passions, People, Pisses you off (what), Purpose, Prayer. "

"TO know thyself, always be true".

"Commitment and Passions can diverge each other".

"Struggle is Mandatory". "Misery is optional".

"Regardless to stature, treat everyone like a king."

"Eliminate pre-conceived notions about whose going to help you."

God puts things and people in your life for a reason. To either curtail you from your wholeness or to ripen that wholeness up. HE is living. Fear is nothing when theres a true love, perfect love, for GOD. Its real. He is real. HE is living.

3 Levels of Human experience:

Competence

Excellence

Mastery

Give yourself that extra push.

Navigate your own course. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

In Conclusion, be ready to hug the world and infect it with your drive, your ambition, your god given talent, to connect leadership with hearty intelligence and understanding. Those who you are suppose to be around will allow you to grow with them.

Be Blessed. Happy thanksgiving. Be thankful.

SLjr.

Seasonal Ending???

Seasonal ending

I have already established (or at least attempted to establish) that life comes in seasons. What I failed to consider was whether or not life’s seasons come to an end. When leaves crumble, should there be hope that the snow will fall again; that rains will come and flowers will bloom again; until its time for the leaves to crumble and fall again.

I once read this short story in elementary school that I will never forget. It talked about this lady who was severely ill; laying in her bed of affliction. When she realized that things in life weren’t changing, when seasons seemed to stop their course of behavior, she assumed that her life was congruent to it.

There was this tree just outside her window and the condition of the leaves gave off the impression that she was in her fall season going into winter. She told her herself that she would remain alive for as long as the leaves would remain on the tree.  Time passed and she noticed that this one leaf refused to fall off. She remained alive for a long time, through different cycles of seasons, just as the leaf remained on the tree; or so she thought.

When nurses came to clean the room after her passing, they realized that the leaf on the tree was no leaf on the tree, but rather the most astonishing painting of a leaf on a window they had ever seen.

In life, all we have is hope and faith. Faith that our steps are ordered, even if our temperamental happiness is sacrificed. And Hope. Hope that there is always a new but recognizable season.

Be prayerful. Be Hopeful. Be humble. Be sought in understanding. Be sought in knowledge. Be sought in faith.

Amen.

Class is now in session...It's Fall...

U 110-Seasons Change

Constantly trying to cross out the future just to rewrite your past. Actions that often keep people from missing their new season. As the wind starts to stiffen and my wardrobe shifts to me putting on more weight, I am in my fall season. Fun is redefined, or at least there should be attempts to aspire to get to that point. Focus. Sharp. Understanding. Patience. Positive. Optimism. Charisma. Realize.

It is so important for the human being to find what they are passionate about and make sure that they pursue it.  Time is truly of the essence; particularly in a society that lives on clocks that tic to the life of a battery. It will run out one day. Life is certainly not promised. Hence, why we focus now.  It is now time to maximize life in everything that God can offer.

This time is the time to fly. Mean what you say. Do not be of what you are in but be in what you are of. Twice. And be a person of action. Learn to learn. Certainly, as I am.

Batman. Lol

To think that one was embarrassed to admit that social studies was he or she’s favorite subjects. s the study of this social world. Relationships. Concepts. Critical thinking. Questioning. Life. Math. Judge ye not.

This really is the season of focus. Family. Wow. Like never before.

Boo. Bear. Traveled. Groomed.

In adapting the human philosophy of learning to learn the language of life, you now enter a world that happens. Habits are good if they are good in nature. People at some point should become warm vessels to which you should seek to understand. Proverbs: Humility, seeking, wisdom, knowledge, understanding. There is such thing as a wrong question. Ask the right ones. Time, once again is realized this season. Push, but patiently. Execute, but only when it’s the right time and when the right setting calls for it. Forget and forgive. Yet another skill the human heart must learn to possess. Human heart. Morals. Judger of judgment. Our steps are ordered. We just have to follow them. Listen.

Realize your full potential and begin to live every day so that it will prepare you to get to that point. Every now and then, remove yourself. Or it will remove you. Especially considering that it will be a step already ordered.

Allow yourself to fall in to focus. Begin to lose parts of you. They are allegoric to sacrifice. All with the faith that what comes after will be of much greater substance.

Earl Stafford. 24 minutes. One must realize that life comes and goes. 24 hours you are here. 24 hours later you are not.

Pray. To grow stronger. Focus. To get stronger. Allow your new season to switch gears.  It is now your fall season.

Amen.

 

 

My summer season....

In the past few months, I've witnessed first hand the aging (or amortization) of one tunnel of vision and simultaneously developing an even larger-more-matured paradigm on life. 

Truth. Knowledge-on a higher level. Maturity. Hopefulness. Humility. Trial. Tribulation. Growth. Language.

I have realized that what we should be doing in life is looking to learn its language. Throughout this summer, imagery along with allegory have showed me that the pictures in life speak to each other. Thus, it becomes our job to figure out what it is it in fact to that which they speak of. 

Numbers. 5. Finishing up 6 and 7. 4 More to go after.

4= equivalent to books 

Now with no key.

83. 16 turned 17. 14 turned 15. 19-turned 20. 21. 4 years. 1911. 1924. 2 months. 1911, twice. 

Thank God. No numbers here, unless all-the-time can be counted. 

My brain operates different now. Though it's difficult to describe, its reminiscent of all those previously outlined. Ultimately, a condition I am not fully equipped for. Similarly, A condition that is lacking in modern day leadership. One must be in it, to win it. In colloquial terms, a leader, in order to be most effective and impactful, must have lived it to breath it. 

Certain souls need certain getaways. And its most important for that soul to make sure that he/she gets away. Corporate America has banked on this huge growth in demand. Diversity. 

I like adverbs. Though, through my generations of school and paper-writing, my teachers have always attempted to discourage me from them. I believe they give you the small details of the sentence that no adjective can give you. Similar to that which makes up what we call life. Its important for us to pay attention. Truth and happiness are always present in life as they constantly spiral. We just have to pay attention to the details to see it, be it and speak it. 

To be able to ask the right questions, feel the right emotions and see the right things is a skill, and not something as innate as people assume. To be able to cross-relate everything that happens in life, around you, in your reality is a skill we must seek to master. Becoming a writer of history. Fuck with the psychology of things. Heavily consider the sociology of those things. Strategically play with the politics of those very same things: solely for your benefit in the hopes that you will have the multitudes more to benefit from that very same it. 

One must look to acquire the skill of constantly questioning their definition of success. Wanting to fall in love with something so divine that it could never be measured or defined. 

One must look to understand the power in people. Once we do that and we subsequently only see the good in people, life blossoms. The air is unlike any other air that one feels. 

Adversity, mentally more than anything is essential to success. Again, the ever looming question of what success constitutes. 

The implicit understanding that we must look to live beyond everything except for being men and women of humanity within the eyes of God.  

We must search to know why life is only temporary but in the process find that we as human beings are apart of a fractional subsection within the universal time. 

Hence success is nothing temporary and it should never be defined to something as it relates. Rather, as life is temporary and so is the body in which we live, success should be something that can impact the time to which we live to something so big so as to change the course of that universal time forever. 

Throughout this vessel of time we live in, there are certain patterns coupled with phases we go through. Namely, making it natural for the spirit of humanity to go through seasons.

This has certainly been a summer season....learn to let the spirit lead you and you not so much lead the spirit, and you will realize your season. 

Suffocation

If summer ended tomorrow, I could honestly say that I have never lived out such a fruitful and rewarding one as I have done thus far. A realization: we are suffocated in our own thoughts (and ignorance) so much that we miss the things that are suppose to matter in life; the fine-tuned details that God does not always provide for you. 

Legal

21.....

Images of me as a free five year old tallying gifts I received for my birth day. 

Vanishing flames of 21 candles with close shots of family and friends in the peripheral makes me realize that the five year old me was so naive. 

It saddens me that it took 16 years of experiencing life to realize that what matters the most is the things that are not counted but seen in and out of the mechanisms of life. 

I feel like writing some really deep soliloquy right but do not have the capacity right now to do so........

My life lesson for 2009- There is a gift and a curse for everything in life. 

A poem....

We are entranced in a world where life is a maze,

Where the joys of pain make us cry and then smile,

Where even the coldest of cold gives us the warmest sensation deep down,

Where the happiest most defining moment in one’s life can instantly crumble

We live a life that involves much confusion.

 

Where wrong is right and right becomes the ultimate wrong,

Sensitized to the pigments of this maze,

Consumed to the only things which appear visible,

Diverted down a path that is apparent to be paved,

Ending at a destination that only contained broken stones.

 

Yes, this is confusion at its grandest, finest time,

When you look left and your left becomes your right,

And your right becomes something totally backwards,

Which direction do you go?

I think the answer to this question is which direction shouldn’t you go,

See, taken a path that’s not less traveled but taken a path that is not traveled at all,

Is where the most confused person, facing the most trying times, will emerge,

Will have experienced, struggled and cultivated these struggles into a creative tandem,

Of knowledge and self enlightenment,

This ones maze now becomes becomes anothers route,

To either follow, hop skip or invent.

 

The option is left to you and where you want you ending to begin

Views on America....

-some brief ideas on America, written January 2009 for an application

 In a perfect storm, the oxy-moronic derivation comes from both the ideal characteristics associated with it’s perfect phase and the negative characteristics associated with it’s storm phase. America is a perfect storm. That is, America’s greatest accomplishment lies in its self-fulfilling promise of opportunity to millions around the world; in a time when a subconscious was forcefully created and lives were molded into the ideals and principles to that of its incumbent leader. America’s greatest failure, however, comes at the onset of this very promise.

As a third-generation American, my mother talks to me about her family’s journey immigrating to the United States from concentration camps in Warsaw, Poland. After hearing her stories of hope for the newfound land of the free, it is apparent her family’s wishful thinking reciprocated to various forms of achieved success. I witness this success everyday within the offspring of these immigrants (myself included). It ranges from the plethora of opportunities presented to my nieces and nephews, in summer programs to cooking classes to dance competitions.  As a Gates Millennium scholar, I have also been fortunate to be apart of America’s greatest accomplishment. 

Within the democratic confines of America, capitalism paved way for millions to flourish. Subsequently, with the rise of industrialization and the developed “urban city”, jobs were in abundance and the envisioned “a house, dog and a white-picket fence” became all the more attainable. President Abraham Lincoln, whose beginning’s stem from poverty, packing grocery bags at a market, fostered the idea of all things possible, eventually holding the most powerful position in the United States of America. The rise of billionaires saw the likes of Charles Schwab and Henry Ford raise the standards on the perception of success. While all of these events created what constitutes the “perfect” in America’s greatest accomplishment, human intuition dictates that nothing is perfect.

When America experienced its greatest accomplishment of creating opportunity for the multitudes, the failure came from her inability to appropriately define what multitudes meant. More specifically, as opportunity became the goal of people; race-relations, ghettos, Jim-crow, and other institutionalized social deviations developed, simultaneously and subtly suggesting that multitudes was a mere representation of a predominate group of people. Hence, this opportunity mainly exists for this properly defined group, leaving others with a disillusioned dream. 

The obvious disparity between wealth is evident in neighborhoods with mansions on one street corner and abandoned houses on the adjacent block. As a Brooklyn New York native, opportunity seemed limitless in some areas while seemingly more than possible in others. Minority and Women owned businesses are established and in two years or less are closed down. They go out of business because the owner’s are inept at financing and maintaining a business. Further exploration indicates that this inability may be the direct result of the flaws in the urban educational system and concomitantly a lack of access to a higher education. Funding for education is primarily focused on schools that are already reaching particular academic standards, leaving little room for funding for schools that in Brooklyn are dubbed “Chancellor’s watch schools”. Now more then ever, young African American and Latino men are increasingly being imprisoned more than any other race and have remained the university’s lowest demographic percentage (besides Native Americans). Hence, only a small proportion of what is defined as the multitudes, have the chance at a proper education. Proper education is directly correlated to acquiring certain skills, characteristics, knowledge and networks too effectively run a business, properly teach children and ultimately give one’s self a better chance at opportunity. Since these ideals are not resonated throughout all of America’s people, America’s greatest failure has come in the form of not fulfilling its promise to all, hence being the storm to all of the perfect ideals she once promised to offer.

Opportunities are only opportunities within the lifetime to which they exist. If a lifetime is synonymous with never existing (as is the case with some), then America is flawed in its greatest asset, accomplishment, liability and failure: a falsified promise of prosperity to all.  

Life

F*** Big Words and Aristotle-esque concepts.

Im so thoroughly confused about some things right now. Equations in my head just do not appear to be equaling. Human nature requires closure. Its seemingly difficult to find this right now.

I feel like God is my only answer but Im still finding it quite hard for me to reach out to him.

Lord, 

I pray that you  grab me.

Amen