*The words that follow result from a man who has spent the majority of his life analyzing every single mistake he’s made, until he’s fully acquainted with the microfibers that make up the structure of each and every one of those mistakes.*
I have studied this. Day classes and night classes. I never close. I stay open.
It’s never too late for you to turn yourself around, and therefore your life. That is the basic yet pivotal lesson to infer from this post I’m writing for you. Even when you’re running out of time, you can accomplish more with what you have remaining than you ever imagined. You can’t do it lying down though. You have to get up.
When life knocks you down flat on your back, there is good to be gained. You see, when you’re down, you’re at bottom. You can’t go any lower. So knowing that, naturally, it follows that all that is left for you to do is rise. And best of all, the moment you begin your rise is when you open yourself up to opportunity. It is important to note that these opportunities can come in all kinds of forms not always immediately obvious. You won’t always see them. You have to seek them.
All that is needed from you is a willingness and the open-mindedness that will propel you forward in your new opportunity. That is more important than knowing exactly what move to make next. Being that you’ve been leveled already, you can go at it with a newfound resolve, because the elements of fear and doubt have been subtracted as a possibility. Fear and self-doubt have been the precursors to many a downfall. You know this.
You cannot rise up while chained and fettered in fear for these powers are wholly incompatible with one another. You cannot engage in both at the same time–you have to choose. Subconsciously you’ve done so already, which is how and why you’ve been brought here.
We all have that thing inside of us where we have to see what happens next. What is that? I’ve been thinking on that mystery for the better part of my life now. I have a couple of answers which I’ve narrowed down to that aspect being a part of a system of regulations inside us that make up an internal governor of sorts. Much like the laws we follow which govern our society so that it’s able to function properly, our mind is also governed by laws, though they lie unseen, they are there nonetheless. We are blessed with gifts beyond our comprehension. I live every day of my life tracing the arc of my journey of understanding in pursuit of making sense of the millions of things that we don’t know and/or understand about ourselves.
You’d have a fairer chance of understanding the Universe before the human mind.
The internal governor, as I refer to it, is worthy of a book in and of itself. In the context of this post I will be brief as to what it can truly do as I do not want this post to be too long. I will remark that it works in conjunction with your conscious and subconscious mind. Depending upon how it’s employed, you can think of it as a counselor or a mediator between those two infinite powers (yes, I said infinite).
For example, all those years ago as a teen, struggling with depression, it was mine that stepped in that night I wanted to kill myself. In my scenario, I didn’t hear a voice telling me to stop. I didn’t even see anything prompting me. I felt something. And when this happened, I knew exactly what it was, despite never having known about it before (because it’s hardwired into all of us). That sharp line between life and death–I didn’t walk over the edge but I sat on it. When I met that edge (or when it met me), I felt a spectrum of light that I heard right after I felt it.
When I pressed the knife against my belly, I felt it and then I heard it.
That was a long time ago but I remember it like it was yesterday. After that night, I never again attempted suicide. I continued to battle my depression and all the self-doubt and anxiety and fear that accompanied it, but after that night I took back control. I saw that even if I brought myself to the edge, I didn’t have to go off it. I had a fail-safe that would step in and pull me back even if I couldn’t (or wouldn’t). Your life begs of you–Why pull back when you were created to go forward?
Just because you find yourself falling doesn’t mean you have to push yourself to fall faster. Instead of speeding up your own downfall, how about speeding up your rise? Instead of focusing on the problems seek the solutions. Instead of waiting for others to notice you, how about noticing yourself. Specifically, instead of expecting others to take responsibility for you, take responsibility over yourself. You don’t need anyone else to tell you that you’re worth it. You have access to a system of systems that sits on a throne above every problem employed against your rise. Just because you’ve never seen it doesn’t mean it’s not there working for you day and night.
All these programs are going on behind the scenes of your mind. The pumping of fresh blood throughout your body. The inhaling and exhaling of oxygen. The building up of new and the breaking down of dead cells. I can go on and on. All of these things are going on in your body and they never stop until your time here is up. When I sat on the edge that night, I looked behind the veil clear to the other side. I will not say exactly what I saw (because a book will be required to fully explain) but you can think of it as looking in the back of the book for answers to every question you’ve queried your mind. That’s the world that is not for us to see until it is time. Given that I am still here among the living in this particular plane/dimension, it is only right I demonstrate the proper respect for this in a forum worthy of it–a book.
In this piece, I merely seek to highlight just some of the gifts you have before you. Gifts that you didn’t have to beg for or ask for or buy. They were given to YOU freely, by the Almighty–the creator of you, of everything you have, and everything you’ve yet to gain. When you are knocked down, this is why you get back up without even thinking about it. Your internal governor knows this already. It knows those things that you know instinctively, yet cannot explain or give words to. An attempt to explain it, is something I seek to do and hope to accomplish in my work.
A lot of times when bad things happen, or we don’t obtain the results we seek, it is easy to hesitate when opportunity presents itself (especially unexpectedly), no matter how favorable. This is something I’m woefully guilty of. Many times in the past, I stammered and stuttered when I should have proceeded with confidence. I try not to say I spent a lot of my life wasting time being hung up with self-doubt but if I’m being honest with myself and you, much of my time was spent with my foot on the accelerator without any force on my part being applied. You can get in your car and put it in Drive all day long, but you won’t go anywhere if you merely rest your foot on the accelerator. You have to depress the pedal to gain movement and momentum. For much of my life, instead of pushing it, I rested on the accelerator known as my potential finding myself arriving nowhere in return.
I needed someone to show up and tell me that it’s ok to fail. It’s ok not to get things right the first time. I put so much pressure on myself not to fail that I inherently raised my expectations at every turn. This, goes for anything I was doing. It could be a new subject in school, or finally gaining the confidence to talk to a girl that had long caught my eye. Anything that came down to a pass or a fail, I put insurmountable pressure on myself to pass the first time every single time. As you’d imagine, these are impossible standards to live by, because in the end you’ll end up miserable or crazy (or both)! Or, depressed. For me, that was the final result every time.
The power of rebooting is not to be underappreciated. If there’s something about your own personality or thinking processes that is clearly holding you back, you have the option (opportunity) to reject it. When you fail, that’s one of the opportunities available to you. Therein lies the blinding light to be discovered just on the other side of the veil of failure. If you just make the effort not to feel sorry for yourself, and peek behind that curtain, you’ll see your folly for what it is, and never duplicate it again. Whatever it was that stopped you will no longer impede you in the future, because you’ve already experienced it, and are learning/have learned from it.
The only way the same pitfall can trip you up in the future is if you allow that to be the case. This is an example of a mistake asking you for permission before proceeding with your own failure. For example, when you know better and know that you should do better, yet consciously choose not to do better, well, you’re literally asking for the impending downfall. This results from consciously choosing failure. If you suffer from this, you are the only one that can go inside your head and change the parameters that govern you. No one can do that for you better than you can. My goal in these posts is to make you realize this about yourself if you don’t already.
Going around in circles that you yourself construct, thereby tripping up your progress? You can dismiss those lines of code in your programming. You have the power to do so immediately. There is no limit to the number of reboots you can undertake. Radical life defining change is always within reach. For the majority, the most radical life change to be put into action is the belief that the best is always ahead of you and that you can bring it out in an instant–even while suspended in the depths of failure.
Rarely does greatness result without failure. Struggle. Even depression. It’s easy to talk about winning and how good it feels and how amazing it is. But you don’t just arrive at the top. You have to work your way up. Sometimes, you not only have to fail, but lose it all. I won’t try and reason out why some lose it all in life. I have to leave that inquiry to a power higher than what I have access to. I can only say that your losses don’t have to define you. And for that matter, neither do your goals, even after you achieve them. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize more and more that it’s not the failures or success that define us, but rather, what we do in between those two extremes.
It is the reboots that define us.
The first step to take after failure is taking responsibility. The sooner you do so, the speedier your rise will be. Always remember that you have a job to do. Even when it seems like you’ve lost it all, you can reboot then and there. Understand this last point and never forget it: You have access to gifts at the ready for the times you find yourself at your weakest, when in reality, you are at your strongest.
Class is in session. The best is yet to come.
–Daniel Cousin
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