A Blessing & A Curse

I sputtered throughout my 20’s attempting to find my place in the world. Building and shaping a confident identity was a road paved with trial and error. I spent far more than I saved. I gorged on luxury clothing. I devoted more attention to the gym than I did my studies. And I leased two Mercedes automobiles. As a young single man in Vegas with a few muscles, I lived and breathed strictly for the here and now. It was never about tomorrow–only today mattered.

Basking in my benighted glow of materialistic bliss, I used to think that the wheels of my future were impervious to the actions of the present. Getting old didn’t even feel like a possibility. Come to find out later on, that one doesn’t account for age until they become aware of the importance of life purpose. Going out of my way in my profligate consumption, I see now that what I was really looking for was a purpose bigger than the bubble I was living in. Inwardly, I was deeply dismayed having spun my wheels for as long as I did because deep down, I wasn’t happy. In truth, I wanted this period of my life (mid to upper 20’s) over as quickly as possible.

Only years later, through constant inductive reasoning, (attempting to make sense of life and its experiences) have I come to realize that the accumulation of experiences that make up a life, all serve their own unique purpose. Each piece of the puzzle is greater than the resultant puzzle. The entire time I was in my 20’s I was looking for the masterpiece already completed in front of me, when I should have paid much closer attention to the individual pieces themselves. The pursuit of instant gratification has a way of watering down the better parts of one’s ability to truly judge what’s directly in front of them. It’s easy to dismiss all of this in hindsight as another example of a person rushing through life but it’s so much more. I wasn’t rushing through life–I was walking over the blessings right in front of me, and this, is the curse that I want you all to avoid. Little did I know, I wallowed in it.

I tell myself even now, don’t cut through the experience, slice, the experiences.

For much of my life, I was confused as to what my purpose was or could be. A great deal of my most finite valuable resource of them all–my time–was spent deciphering every layer of every ambiguity of what was a spiritual vessel lacking a defined goal. I’ve come a long way, but I have a ways to go as even now, rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, my words still reflect my own continually evolving sense of moral judgements, biases, personal preferences, and fears. I write in times of strength and weakness as well as confidence and diffidence. Having gotten better at distinguishing the moving parts of the two powers (blessing & curse), I’m better able to discern which words are needed when required accordingly. Words give tongue to pain and hardship as well as triumph and success. The basis for my words is for you to limit the frequency and duration of negative experiences in your own life (in particular, negative thoughts in your mind) by sharing all of mine, so you don’t make the mistakes I have.

Most of my fears center around my failures. Having shrouded myself in lifeless stillness, I did all I could to display a glass jaw image of happiness and success. But beneath that thin veneer was a woe betide me countenance ever ready to reveal itself in private, away from the prying eyes of others. I am so glad those dim days and dark nights are behind me. Now I can take what I’ve been through and pay it forward to the next person so that they too can overcome. Should you suffer from not knowing your place in the world and feeling more mixed up than the sands of the seas, this is for you.

When I look back at my younger self, it’s hard for me to understand why I did a lot of the things I did. In this case, I’m not referring to little things–letting peer pressure get to me and thereby doing things to prove I’m “one of the guys” or picking up a weight in the gym too heavy for me to manage properly because a cute girl is working out nearby. Oh no… I’m talking about somehow managing to make dumb choices despite (or because of) investing significant time and mental energy in my deliberation. In those critical times, when you have a complex problem or challenge that must be overcome, so you analyze it from every angle, and having done so, you come away completely convinced that you have the best answer, when in reality, you’ve just made the dumbest judgement possible. “What was I possibly thinking?” is the primary refrain that results in 20/20 hindsight.

Still, behind every curse is a blessing–somewhere. I’m not one to tell you that it’s always going to be easy and obvious to spot, because that isn’t nearly the case. But it’s there somewhere and it will be up to you to find it. The wonderful thing in life is we almost always have more than one choice when it comes to practically anything. When I problem solve, I imagine an endless number of pathways to choose from, ranking them from worse to better. I consciously choose to narrow my list of probable choices down to that most narrow of channels for my thoughts and impulses to decide upon, to further increase my probability of success so that it is all but inevitable (at least I tell myself success is inevitable). Oh! If only the real world and its results were as perfect as the controlled experiments that make up the laboratories of my mind.

Life is a series of experiments. Some of which are controlled; other’s, less so.

An uncontrolled experiment is something like (God forbid) boarding a plane that goes on to crash. There’s nothing you can do about that. Incidents such as these which cannot be explained and are in a realm beyond our reasoning can only be attributable to a power beyond the scope of our understanding. Now, for those experience experiments where we can at least somewhat influence the outcome–it is this which I want to speak with you about today.

How can we expand the number of blessings and minimize the curses? As I sit here I don’t know the answer to this, so I’ll do what I always do. I’ll send the scenario to my mind while it walks me along the path to its answer. I’ll start with an example that probably all of us have thought about.

Imagine hitting it big and winning the lottery–you know those Powerball and Mega Millions jackpots that you hear about when they reach an insanely high number (nine or ten figures!). It’s so easy to sit back and imagine all the neat things you could do with that kind of money. Just think about it right now–Wouldn’t it be great if you were rich? If you’re rich already, wouldn’t you like to be even richer? You’ll never hear anyone proclaim their desire to be poorer. We all want to be richer than what we currently are. Varying degrees of what constitutes rich may vary from person to person, but all told, the end result is the same–we all see ourselves happy and basking in our richness!

So I pose a question to myself right now as follows: If being rich is a blessing, how is it also a curse? As with most anything else in our world, there’s a certain duality that looms with money. That same duality extends to pretty much anything we do. Putting myself on the spot, I’d say that the defining difference maker between whether the results that come in are good or bad is preparation. How prepared are you, for what in all accounts, is a magnanimous responsibility? How equipped are you to deal with it on all of its varying multi-tiered levels?

Going back to the lottery example, how is it that there are instances of people who having won a jackpot in the eight or even nine figure range find themselves broke within a few years of cashing out? If this isn’t a blessing and a curse, I don’t know what is. Being that I’ve never won the lottery or come into any sum of money worth writing about, this is all up to conjecture. As it is, most salient for me would have to be the thoughts of the lottery winner in question. The reason so many of them go broke is, prior to winning the mega jackpot, they never visualized to themselves actually being that rich, and, managing to hold on to it thereby growing it even larger. And if they did, they did not do so exclusively. A simple example of this is when you feel like you have a lot of something–anything–a common fear we all retreat to is the fear of losing it all. If you’ve never had vast sums of money and all of a sudden you come into more than you’ve ever had previously, your immediate fear is going broke. These debilitating lines of thinking lead to our destruction faster than we can prepare ourselves for. This is the common cross-talk that occurs in our thoughts that is of our own making which deprives us of the blessings we want thereby keeping us mired in curses. Allow me to explain further…

Your life is one giant stage. To get to where you want to be in life, all you have to do is rehearse. You have to practice daily, just as an actor would before they go on stage or on camera. What I’m getting at is, so many of us wait until things are perfect before we take action. A simple example of this is someone who says something innocuous like, “I’ll be happy when it’s the weekend.” I’ll look over at them knowing that we’re nowhere near the weekend and just wonder to myself–“You’re really going to spend 5 days out of the week waiting to be happy for just two of them?” You can apply this change in your judgement to every aspect of your life. I hear people all the time talking about how much happier they would be if they could lose 10 pounds. I find myself scratching my proverbial head because why not be happy first, and then, go on to lose the 10 pounds. Would it not be easier to lose the weight if you’re operating from a position of happiness as opposed to sadness? What I want to get through to people is–We hold ourselves back without even realizing it, chasing after a fleeting feeling of happiness when we could grant it to ourselves almost instantaneously. In other words, we withhold blessings from ourselves daily. This line of thinking is an example of a curse.

You see, you have the blessing right in front of you. You’re at a fork in the road and you’re given the choice: blessing or curse?

If you choose to abound in blessings you must go after them exclusively. You can’t have 100 thoughts in your mind whereby 10 of them are blessings and the other 90 are curses. Like a ship with a giant gash in its hull, you will take on more water than you can withstand and find yourself sinking in a flash. If you want for your blessing to remain a blessing, you absolutely cannot allow yourself to be mired in the tumult of negative thinking. Nothing will take you down the elevator of mediocrity faster than the vice like grip which results from negativity being produced by your own mind, particularly if the negative thoughts are directed at you and your self-worth.

With each day, you have a choice. Blessing or curse? What you have to do is align yourself with positivity to the point where your entire being is synonymous with blessings. You have to ready yourself to receive the blessings. So many of us struggle for so long with life beating us with every branch of the tree of despair that we literally don’t expect good things (or enough good things) to happen to us. We preach to ourselves about the “daily grind” and say things like “no rest for the weary (or the wicked)” when it does not have to be. When you say things like this you may be speaking for the moment, but what you’re also doing is actively programming your future. That is why no matter how much you fight you continue to struggle. Your words (in particular those directed to you by you) are bound by laws, just as you are.

To change your life, change your thoughts.

Words are intelligent beings. For example, every word I write brings about a weight of purpose that is born of a deep desire to do right by you (the reader). With each word you employ, there’s an undercurrent attached to it. Positive or negative. Good or bad. Your words carry power. Like you, think of words as having their own frequency–the biorhythms of which can change accordingly depending upon the order in which you have them arranged. They are not only the pieces of the puzzle–they are the frame.

In terms of this power, how will you use it? Will you employ it or step aside and let it employ you?

Having committed enough blessings and curses in my own existence, I’m grateful that I can shed some light on the innate wisdom to be gained from each. Life has a way of opening your heart to the full dimensions of the life experience, so that you can not only understand issues you once thought about in abstract terms, but actually empathize with them. And this, is how I came around to seeing the power of words–they are the blessing and the curse. What you say and what you think dictates more degrees of dominion over yourself and those around you than I can possibly pen in one post.

Believe faithfully, that the warm glows that underpin your happiest of thoughts is nothing less than an auspicious foresight at the magnificence of what’s to come. I only hope that I am ready enough to ready you for it. If you’re like me, whether you realize it or not, you’ve always had the resources. What was missing was direction. Your life is your bounty. I encourage you to collect all life experiences with vigor and meet it with your highest esteem because you’re too blessed to be stressed.

Monitor your thoughts, for they, or neither you, are a lonely outpost set up against a lifeless backdrop of stillness. You can be that person you’ve always known yourself to be. It is so.

–Daniel Cousin

Do you like this post? Do you want more like this? Comment and subscribe to my blog. Feel free to let me know what you think. Also, you can reach out to me on the links below as follows:

E-Mail: daniel@danielcousin.com