#31 Building a New Foundation

INTRODUCTION

What we call the beginning is often the end.  And to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from.  – TS Elliot

     Amid the escaping thoughts and burrowing beliefs, it is easy to throw your arms up in frustrated defeat exclaiming, “This stuff doesn’t work for me!”  But it does work and it will work for you too.  How do we build your new foundation amidst the towering inferno of junk thinking?  We start at the end of course for the end is well worth pursuing.

     What do you want to be when you grow up?  How differently you would answer that question if you believed anything were possible for you.  You might answer an astronaut or an actor, a professional athlete, Olympic hockey champion or maybe a professional race car driver.  If only you believed that these choices are available to you, instead of available to just a few fortunate people.  How quickly you could devise an answer to life’s most challenging question of:  What do you want to be?

     Since you do not believe in you, you settle.  That question then becomes very difficult to answer as you weed through your second, third or maybe last choice options.  If being neither a dentist nor an eye surgeon appeal to you, how do you pick?    If you despise your current job, yet find other similar forms of work just as unappealing how do you pick?  If you are overweight, but believe you cannot stick to a rigid exercise regimen, then why bother?  How do you know what bills to pay in the midst of financial stress?  How do you dig yourself out of whatever hole you happened to stumble in just to find yourself falling in another rut?  Polarized thoughts plague your decision making as you try to rationalize amongst worst or best case scenarios.

     Focusing on only your ideals steers you towards the ideal.  Regardless of your current situation, no matter how bleak or desperate it seems, you can make it only a temporary endurance.  You make it temporary by, as they say in sports, putting your eye on the ball.  What is the ball in our case?  Your ideals!  It might seem an impossible situation having spent your life installing your predicament.  Wherever you are now, how you feel, situations you face, crisis that plague you can all be obliterated the moment you choose to focus on what is ideal instead of what is less than ideal. 

     It does not matter how old you are, how much you weigh, how ill you feel, how financially strapped you are.  You can still tower above your stinking thinking. 

Consider the now thriving Bayshore Town Center located near Milwaukee in Glendale, Wisconsin. It bustles with commerce!  This massive showcase for redevelopment combines retail shops, offices, restaurants and apartments.  This strong drawing area adds added property and sales tax revenue.  You would never know, however, this site was formerly an unlicensed dump filled with bottles, concrete rubble and household garbage.  So you see it does not matter that the foundation you sit upon is garbage.  It is what you decide to erect going forward that matters.  If you are not willing to erect what is ideal, you will be heaped of serving of what is less than ideal.  The choice is always yours.