Wake Up

The Awakening

One day, you wake up realizing that you are lying in the burning ruins of what used to be your perfect world, ashes and smoke everywhere. Your vision is clouded, you feel fear, regret, anger and confusion is upon you. You have so many questions, and almost no answers. Rejoice, for this is the worst day of your life yet, but at the same time it is the day that will change who you are, that will define you as a man. It is the day that you wake up. It is better to be awake in the world that is burning, rather than dream in the perfect world.  Because when you are truly awake you can rebuild everything around you, make it stronger and bigger and take responsibility for your life, but the ones who sleep will keep burning until there is nothing left.

The Enemy

 

Upon waking up from your happy slumber you will encounter the strongest enemy that you have ever faced. That enemy is you. Your world is not burning because somebody set it on fire, your world is burning because you felt asleep and lost control. It might seem tempting to blame others because it is easy, it releases you from any responsibility for what is happening around you and most importantly it lets you go back to sleep because in your head you did nothing wrong, you were just sleeping while others did you wrong. This is your fear, your laziness, your incompetence telling you to give up and go back to sleep, to stop fighting. Because as human beings we hate change, we are scared of it and our brain will do everything to try and prevent any drastic change from happening. It is your responsibility to recognize this and fight it. Fight yourself, your habits, your fears until you prevail. In the empty battlefield of burning ruins you are the only one standing and you have only one enemy, either you emerge victorious from the battle, or let the enemy defeat you and put you down to sleep again.

The Weapons

Unlike your enemy you have the upper hand in this fight because you have two very powerful weapons at your disposal. A shield and a sword. First weapon is your sword which is your anger, it will give you the needed motivation for the change. Anger is a dangerous weapon, it is like a nuclear bomb; very powerful but one slight misuse and the results will be catastrophic, so you have to direct your anger very carefully. Direct it only to improve yourself, never to hurt the others. The second weapon is discipline. In order to make permanent changes a man needs time to improve, to become stronger and to rebuild his empire. This period of time will not be easy, and the progress might not always be obvious, it is at this period that your enemy will be the strongest and you will need a shield which is your discipline. Discipline will keep you going, even if you do not see the end of the road, even if the attacks of your enemy are getting stronger it will protect you from them until you make it. If you know that you are doing the right thing, if you know that it will bring you to the place where you want to be engrave it on your shield and don’t stop no matter what.

The Battle

The battle that I am describing is completely internal. We go through our daily lives passing people by and never noticing their struggle. Some of them have already lost the battle and probably will never make it, some are still fighting and some have never even woken up from their dream, but I guarantee you that winning this battle is the most beautiful and powerful feeling ever. It is this time, that all the burning stops and you regain yourself. Defeating that enemy you stand alone victorious. It is winning this internal battle that brings true change and defines you as a man. So if you are awake, don’t you dare to ever go back to sleep, keep going until you make it, keep fighting until you win.

Who We Want to Be

The Final Destination.

Life is a journey. I guess starting my first post with such a cliche may seem like a bold move, but I prefer to be honest with my beliefs. And even though every person might consider life as a journey, only few actually wonder what the final destination is and how to get there. We reached an age where information is so abundant and overwhelming that it is easy to get lost in your journey and take wrong turns, listen to wrong advice, I speak from my own experience when I say this. However I do believe that it is when we take that wrong turn and overcome the challenge we are presented with, we emerge as a stronger and more complete person. And every time that happens to us we get one step closer to “Who we want to be” which is our final destination.

The Reason.

Every action that I have taken so far, every moment of my life has brought me here, to the point where I sit and type my thoughts out of the need to share them in hope of finding solace by reflecting upon them. I will not pretend that I have some ultimate qoal of changing people’s lives and being the saint to save them all. Truth is people can not be saved unless they want to be. However it will bring me great joy if somebody does find these writing useful.

My Journey to Liberation.

While usage of word liberation may seem banal, I am not able to find any other word to describe the freedom that I have attained from recent realizations I had in my life. You know that moment when you suddenly turn on lights in the dark room and your eyes hurt but at the same time you are happy that you can finally see, this is exactly what I felt like after spending last 4 years of my life in the dark. I will expand on details in some other post but I feel obligated to briefly describe what darkness was for me in order to explain what liberation is. The darkness was letting other people to control my life, my feelings and basing my emotional state and self-esteem upon other people’s opinions and actions. In the past years I have let people, to interfere with what I want, I have stopped pursuing my goals and dreams in order to please others. This sounds like I am blaming others for my failures, but I am not, the fault is entirely mine, and the liberation was finally seeing that I am to blame for every wrong turn that I took, I am to blame for every single moment that put me down, and the final phase of liberation was to understand that I am the only one who can fix everything. If you are reading this and this makes sense to you then here are initial steps you must take in order to be a liberated man.

• Be completely honest with yourself regarding your insecurities, problems and internal struggle. Write them down, as the 12 step program says, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one.

• If you think about it every problem comes from the lack of information. We did not want to do a mistake, we just did not know better. So start researching, reading, gathering information and identify the solution for your problem.

• The hardest part of it all is finding solution, once you have it all that you need to do is start applying it and developing a routine for it. If you develop a routine your brain will rewrite itself and you will start finding pleasure in your activities

By using this simple method I have achieved more success in past 2 month than I have in past 2 years. A basic example would be, during the past 2 years I have gained a lot of weight which made me uncomfortable. For long period of time I chose to stay in the dark about it by thinking that I am what I am and people should accept me and love me just the way I am, but I forgot, I forgot the biggest question of them all is this “Who I want to Be?”. And people around you sense it, they can feel that it is not really you, if you feel uncomfortable in your body, that prevents you from being well…you. So after I identified this problem I developed a solution that best suits my needs. First, I imagined an ideal body that I would be the most comfortable in. Second was going past the looks and actually think about abilities that I would want it to have. I always wanted to learn how to fight properly, be more flexible and have better stamina. So now that I have chosen the looks and the properties that I want to obtain I researched ways of obtaining them. For looks I need to go to the gym and do bodybuilding using appropriate program, nutrition and supplementation. For flexibility, stamina and fighting I need to pick up a fighting course and attend it regularly. As I write this and re-read it myself I realize how simple this all seems and yet a lot of people find this so difficult because it takes time, energy and dedication to do all this research. The most difficult part is starting, after that it all became a routine to me, going to the gym and attending my martial arts classes.  The beauty of it is once I developed routine my brain stopped rewarding my destructive behavior like playing video games all day and I stopped being interested in that . Instead I now feel the need to go to the gym and to my classes and feel extremely bad if I skip them.

Who we Want to Be

Above was a greatly simplified example which demonstrated steps of how you can approach anything that you identify as problem. I could go into great detail about if it is worth identifying something as a problem or what if we deem something as a problem when in reality it is not, however I feel like that should be a topic for another post. The main point is my liberation was realizing that majority of problems that I thought were coming from outside sources was actually my internal struggle with my ignorance and laziness. I looked in the mirror every day and every time I hated the reflection that was staring back at me with greater passion until one day I decided to change that reflection and be complete. Just being yourself is the worst advice anybody will ever give you. Don’t just be yourself, be the best possible version of yourself, the one that you have in your mind. It is the most beautiful and liberating feeling when you look in the mirror and see the man that you want to become.