It's in My Future

This is the dream ride. The Bentley Continental GT Coupe. It's in my future.....Promise! Speaking of the future how does one change his or her future???? I know God has it laid out for you but there has to be alternate paths right???? There has to be because so many people end up in bad spots in here lives. Maybe God gives you forks in the road that you choose which one is the right one. After all, you do choose the path that leads to him or leads to a much worse place.

All this leads me back to the question. How does one change his or her future? I know the standard answers. I know the Tony Robbins' self-help, self improvement answers. Robbins even believes that one decision can change your life forever, so he even believes that you chose your path. How do you get off the path you are on and go to another. But not only that how do you stay on the new path? How do you develop the faith and internal fortitude to stay on that path when it is terribly uncomfortable? It may be good for you and your life but it is terribly uncomfortable. The old path is bad for your life but it is uncomfortable. How do you re-train yourself?

The majority of our community, the Black Community, have not re-trained ourselves. We have not re-trained ourselves since slavery. What good is freedom if your mind is not free. We were dumped on a new path but we had no map so we were uncomfortable. So what have we done? We have retained the freedom title but we went back to the slavery mindset/path. That mindset has keeps us contributing in a slave like fashion to a system that a large part of our community gets no wealth out of. The difference between now and then is that now we contribute our labor and our wages. During slavery we had no wages.

The point of this post is not to talk about that larger issue but to talk about me. How do I change my path/mindset. I have lived a life that appears to be a cake walk to some, but a nightmare to me.

I lived in what appeared to be a decent household growing up. I was the star high school athlete, good grades, football scholarship, M.B.A., Fortune 500 companies and a beautiful wife and family. Yet all the while, I struggled to make it thorough every day because at home I was an abused child. Every positive signal I got outside my house was negated by the negative ones I got at home. I was abused for years and no one knew. So here I am at 40 years old with so many successes in my life and I can't in my heart, accredit them to me. Just dumb luck I guess.
People look at me and see something good, something positive. Me, I just hope they don't find out who I really am. A sad, insecure little boy who has no idea what to do with his life.

Now, that I am dealing with my past I have to retrain myself. How do I tell myself, and believe, that I (and God of course) have created and driven these things in my life? The thing that makes me most sad is that I see my potential (as I do in many other people) going to waste. If the good things in my life are by my doing then I (and God) have created them while using 4 out of 12 cylinders in my engine. The other eight have been dedicated to just getting myself out of bed and through the day without losing it for so long that it will be difficult to re-deploy them into truly living.

The real me lives in a box most of the time. Only with certain people that I trust do I let all of me out. The box is how I protected my self when I was young and I continue to do so. Here is a piece I wrote about 'The Box'.

Life in the Box

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Dark
Safe
Self-contained
Insulated
Painless
Loveless
Joyless
Fearless
Shameless
Safe

That's all I got.

I'm Out!'
44Black