The View from My Window

Those with low self-esteem and the emotionally weak should be extra wary of negative people: Like positive people they tend to clump together. When they do they can easily make people with low self-esteem and emotional frailty believe themselves and not the negative spirits of those around them to be the issue. People seeking acceptance and who feel they're islands in seas of negativity may adopt the thinking of those around them: that being negative is the norm and being positive is synonymous with immaturity, irresponsibility, weakness and detachment from reality. At all times you should seek the light and avoid the darkness and those who embrace it.

The people I most admire are those with great spiritual strength.

Inner strength and peace are worth the weight of the world in gold.

Everything is all I want.

Where there's a will God will make a way.

If someone faults or questions you for making a mistake maybe you could say, "Excuse me. I've just had a human moment."

Analysis is best directed inward.

Any recurring event, situation, experience, sight, vision, dream or image holds a message. Observe and learn it.

You can change your jeans, but you cannot change your genes.

In looking ahead always hope for the best and plan for the worst.

Often, you have to go through the crap to get to the crop.

People who bewilder you often bewilder themselves.

If everything in your life makes sense God is failing you.

There is only one Universal Law, God, and there's hell to pay for disobeying it. You can get away with breaking civil laws if you're never caught. You can't get away with breaking God's Law.

Hardship is God's way of telling you to get out of His way.

God pays Mother Earth child support.

A New Year has arrived. An acquaintance wrote in her blog: "Looking forward to a New Year, I have faith it will be better!! " She needs to have more than faith. The new year won't automatically be better or worse than the prior one. Aside from events and situations beyond your control much of how any year--and any day--turns out is up to you. People who think the new year will be better without them being or doing better will be disappointed. A calendar date is nothing more than a set of numbers. It has no importance beyond what we give it. After all, that entity or presence that many of us call "God" does not care about our numbers. What matters is how we think and what we say and do on that calendar date.

Bad experiences or situations as well as good ones can remind us that we're on the right track. An example would be someone seeking to leave a difficult working environment, giving his employer two weeks notice and then seeing the working environment at the current job worsen before the end of those two weeks. That eliminates the thinking, "Maybe I should wait a bit longer."

Recently, René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet and Adolf Merckle--billionaires--committed suicide after suffering financial losses. The Frenchman lost money in Bernard Maldoff's scam. The German lost millions in risky stock. You wonder why losing money would make a billionaire feel hopeless about rebounding financially. People with way less money have lost money and more and not committed suicide. I'm among them. Within the past several years I've lost my father to cancer and my maternal grandfather to kidney failure, been laid off and then had to take a job paying much less after a long, fruitless job search. I'm in a huge financial hole and trying to climb out. A week into New Year 2009 I received a 12/24/08 letter from a company I voluntarily left in 11/2007 requesting I reimburse them for supposedly overpaid severance. I had that problem a month after leaving the company, and thought I had resolved it--without paying a dime--after much calling and writing. This is the same company that paid me much less than a prior one. "Weird" doesn't quite describe what my life has been since 2004. You could add "frustrating" and "infuriating." Whatever you call it, it has made little if any sense. I have no idea where it's all headed and, I must admit, it is scary sometimes. Still, I'm not suicidal. For one, I have my spirituality to sustain me. (That was my human side on display a few sentences ago.) I can also compose music and write as diversions. You could further say that like many of us who've never been wealthy I'm used to hardship. Those who've been wealthy their entire lives have not. The French billionaire who commited suicide came from old money, dating back to the Napoleon era. These men are two reminders that money--and relationships--cannot make you whole. Only you can do that.

This is hardly new, but it seems that those white people who appropriate their idea of black behavior always imitate a negative, stereotypical black persona. It can range from general rudeness to a mock thug image. They're imitating what they--and quite a few black people--consider a truly black persona. As far as they're concerned the black person who gets into trouble is more "real" than the one who gets into the stock market. The black person who goes to prison is more "real" than the one who goes to college.

Further on the subject of "blackness," who defines what it is? Who are these self-anointed cultural police who decide what's black and what's not, who seek to culturally confine themselves and other black people? Why is it more acceptable for a white person to like "black music" than it is for a black person to like "white music"? White people who like black entertainers seldom if ever face questions about their whiteness. Meanwhile, black people who like any white entertainers are often treated as if they were exotic zoological specimens. People accuse them of trying to be or act white or seemingly wonder, "What are you?"