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.