Day 61 - Responsibility of an animal lover

We hold the lives of animals in our hands when we take on the responsibility of their care, cherish it and place yourself in their shoes when the time comes.

Day 49 - Speed Kills

I do not know if this is advertised in all countries or only here, but we have the “Arrive Alive” advertisements on the radio, tv and on Billboards which is basically to tell people things like “speed kills” and “don’t drink and drive”. The adverts are built around these points. I am looking at the point of speed kills and how it can be used on more points than just driving.

If you look at how you interact with people, I am sure you have memories of arguments about inconsequential points that could have been avoided by simply slowing down and taking a moment to listen to each other and discuss a point without being aggressive and trying to make the other see it your way. The principle that I am looking at is taking everything one point at a time. In terms of a conversation, you hear and consider what the other person is saying and if you are unclear you ask them to repeat. In terms of your process you stop yourself from being overwhelmed by points and using the feeling of “it is too much” to give yourself an excuse to fall, by looking at one point at a time and working with that point until it is clear. I understand that while you are working on that one point that there will be others that come up. When this occurs I suggest you write it down on the side and once you have completed the point you are working on you can get to the ones that came up while you were writing.

Looking at the speed kills point and how all of this ties together you can see how when you are trying to accomplish something whether it is you trying to bring your point across in an argument or you are trying to work on yourself and your process. The point that is starting to become apparent is that we tend to rush to get what we want and have no patience when it comes to considering what it will actually take to get it. This is what I see if I place the point of speed kills into my daily life. I see how that point can impact more than driving, it can also be a tool to assist in working with rushing through life, because when we rush we tend to think that our actions affect only ourselves which is the same as when we drive in a dangerous way and think that is only us as the driver who is accepting the risk of an accident without realizing that when we have or cause an accident that there are others involved and that they get hurt and that it would be our responsibility.

The next time you see yourself wanting to rush to get what you want, consider that there are consequences for our actions and that those consequences affect the ones around you too.

Day 48 - The Difference Between Life and Death

A few days ago Maite found a chick that had been abandoned while it was hatching and when she found it, it was stuck almost three quarters in the egg. She thought it was dead until he saw it move and heard the squeak. She brought it up to me in the house and we carefully took the little goo covered chick out of the shell.

Now, when the chicks are hatching – which is in the last 3 days of the 21 day brooding cycle – they need to be kept warm and the mother helps to clean the shell goo off, if the baby doesn’t eat it. We took the little baby and wrapped it up in a blanket and kept it in constant contact with our bodies, like a hen, to generate body heat. We also had to stay awake with it for the first two nights to help keep it warm and to keep it company.

When this happens – it has happened before that we find day old chicks that have been abandoned and that we have to take it in – we have a few points that we have to keep an eye out for as “milestones” so to speak, which give us some insight into how the chick is doing and they are: that the chick is eating on their second day of life, that the chick is drinking on its first day of life, that the chick poops on their second day of life and – most importantly that they Choose to live.

With chickens we can easily see what happens when they give up and when they are not willing to give up. If they give up, they get sick and they die or they just stop eating and die or even just go lie down somewhere for days until they die if there is no intervention. If they do not give up then they can get sick and just keep on going until we notice it and give them medicine to help with the sickness or they get hurt, which can be pretty brutal and they just don’t stop fighting to live, meaning that they continue eating drinking and everything while we try to help them. The simple point is that if they give up they will die no matter what we do, but if they do not give up and their wounds are not too severe they will live with our help.

This is interesting as the same principle applies to everyone. I’m sure everyone can relate to situations of feeling ‘hopeless’ – like nothing can be done or ‘we’re too far gone’ – where, it’s not that we’re physically incapacitated or physically incapable of moving, of supporting ourselves, of standing, but it seems like such an arduous task. In those moments – the defining factor is whether we choose to stand. When you look at the baby chick and what it went through – when we found her, she was in the direst of conditions – totally helpless, no support whatsoever, hanging on by a thread – but she hadn’t given up. She chose to live and today she is as strong and as healthy as any chick. If she had given up by default – then there would really be no hope, then her fate would have been sealed, regardless of any attempts of intervention.

Support given to us can only take us so far – what cannot be given to us is the decision to live, the decision to stand, the decision to change. Choice is truly the difference between life and death, between festering and recovering, between stagnation and change. Consider then, what do I choose to do with my life? Who do I choose to be?

Day 39 - Stepping out of Bernard’s Shadow

I don’t know what to say

How do I say the unsayable?

How do I explain the inexplicable?

How do I see what I don’t want to look at?

Bernard is dead

I don’t know what to do

I don’t know how to feel

All I feel is fear and anger

I am me

I will no longer allow myself to define myself according to what Bernard did

I will no longer allow myself to use him as a shield

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to define myself as no more or less than Bernard’s Son

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hide behind Bernard and use him as a shield to block myself from my process

I miss him

I see that he is within everything

I see that I am afraid that he left too soon

I see that I am afraid that I am not strong enough to stand

I see that he trusted us all to push ourselves to change, but that he saw that not all would be able to allow themselves to choose

I see that – in truth – there is no real choice as we are all responsible for what we have created and as such, the responsibility to change is what all of us must allow ourselves to realise

He was not my father

He was not my friend

All he was, was what each of us must see in ourselves

He stood for all

He sacrificed whatever was necessary to allow everyone to make a choice between life and slavery

I cannot say that any of us would be able to do the same

He feared nothing

He was always stable

He taught us all, anything we were able to understand

I cannot say that I always listened

I cannot say that I always understood

I cannot say that I always honoured his principles

I can say that I am in the process of changing myself to truly be able to follow his principles to the utmost of my ability

I can say that I am in the process of working through my fears

I can say many things

I can say anything

What I have lived and what I do live is who and what I really am

What I live is selfishness

What I live is ego

What I live is anger

I see that I am angry at him for not fixing all of my problems

I see that I am angry that I did not allow myself to work harder on changing myself with his assistance while he was still alive

I forgive Bernard for leaving

I forgive Bernard for choosing to leave

I forgive Bernard for not preparing us more

I forgive Bernard for asking us to continue without him

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be angry at Bernard for leaving

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be angry at Bernard for leaving me and cerise

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be angry at Bernard for not preparing us more

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be angry at Bernard for asking us to continue without him guiding us

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to see myself as too weak to stand

The decision I have made is to change

The decision I have made entails the responsibility of pushing myself beyond my current cycle of comfortability

I realise that this means that I have to push myself to be consistent within basic principles of self-motivation, self-discipline and self-dedication to the process of change

I dedicate myself to the simple act of writing a blog everyday

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to make mistakes

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use the self-created idea that anything I do has to be perfect as “I am the Son of Bernard”

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be angry at myself for making mistakes as the mistakes reveal my imperfection

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear revealing my imperfections as the imperfections reveal my vulnerabilities

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear being vulnerable

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use paranoia and fear of how people will react to my blogs as an excuse and justification to not write

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use specific words to redesign my self-forgiveness statement so as not to actually assist myself, but to keep myself in a never ending cycle of self-abuse

I commit myself to when and as I see that I am trying to abuse my self-forgiveness through how I place my words, I stop and correct the design of the sf statement so that I can allow myself to forgive myself for real

I commit myself to consistently blog, where I do not accept and allow myself to use excuses and justifications to not blog

I commit myself to learn from my mistakes and not use them as an excuse or justification to go into isolation, hiding and fear

Related articles

• Day 243: Living Income Guaranteed and Communism
• Day 456: Inflation and the Living Income Guaranteed
• Day 451: The Tap Planned Obsolescence within Basic Income Guaranteed
• Day 459: BIG Pilot Project Namibia: a Perspective
• Day 461: Skeptics Failed the Jesus Message
• Day 458: Facts and Feelings: How to Stop and Prevent Brainwashing
• Day 462: Natural Learning Ability and World Change
• Day 463: Can Animals be Brainwashed?
• Day 454: A Bankrupt World
• Day 241: Will Inflation be a Problem with Providing a Living Income Guaranteed?

Day 21 - I lost my Friend, My Brother

I lost someone who is was and always will be more than family, brother, father and friend. He died in October 2011. As far as I know he killed himself. His name was Anthony. The first memory I have of him is from when I was around 10-11 years old. My mother had recently married another man and he was an aggressive, self-absorbed type of man. He had physically hurt me a few times – not as extensively as some who was actually beaten but enough to make me fear and hate men older than me. The memory of Anthony I have is from when he was dating my sister and they had sat me down to talk to me about why I was so scared and aggressive towards him. I told them that I was scared that he was going to hurt me like my step-father did and started crying, so Anthony hugged me and told me that he would never hurt me. Some of the details may be off but this is one of the strongest memories I have of him. I cannot remember how long I had known Anthony before this.

Anthony was an amazing man to me. He would always treat me like an adult and talk to me as such and point out when I was doing something wrong, but I do not have a single memory that I can find of him being angry at me or of him ever being angry. He was a lot of fun to be around. He was always able to put people into a good mood and make them laugh. He was open, honest and always willing to help me, but at that stage I wasn’t willing to get help from anyone about anything in my life. I was a bratty little child. He never told me that there was something I couldn’t do and was willing to show me anything I wanted to learn that he was able to teach, but I was never a very good student as I thought of myself as unable to do anything without help. Most of the time when I needed something, I went to him as I wasn’t willing to look and learn to do it myself. I used and abused him for his knowledge and was happy with having someone that I could get what I wanted from.

At one stage we were going to learn to do game programming together. He was a computer software programmer. He was the guy that knew everything about computers and taught me almost everything that I know – other than what I have needed to learn by myself since his death. He tried to teach me to do programming but I was being a lazy idiot who wouldn’t show up for lessons and wouldn’t learn as much as I could have – in the time that I was actually there. I wanted to learn to do it but I wasn’t committed, as I thought that he would do it and I would just “ride along with him” so to speak. After a while of this we stopped this project as it just wasn’t moving. Learning to program games and software is still something I would like to learn, but I am not sure if there will ever be the same opportunity again. I wasted my chance to learn from his expertise, which means that when I do find the time to do this it will take longer as I will not have someone that is already experienced in the field to assist and guide me.

Anthony taught himself how to write programming code by Bernard taking him out of the computer repair department the one day and taking him to the programmer that was working for us at that stage and telling him to teach Anthony how to write code. The programmer showed Anthony to a computer with the appropriate software and gave him a book and told him, here’s the book now teach yourself how to write software. He taught himself using self-motivation and a book. I envied him for the motivation he had in relation to whatever he wanted to learn or do. I thought that I was unable to do that for myself as I thought that I need someone to push and motivate me instead of me motivating myself – I problem that I still have today.

After that we bought and renovated a new office building that had 4 flats built into the property. Anthony, a few others and I had to stay while we renovated so as to “protect” the property as we didn’t have a security system yet and a lot of the flats were still partly open – in terms of no doors on the verandas and so on. We slept on the floors for about 2 months (if I remember correctly) before we moved into the flats. Anthony and I took one, while a friend of ours that also worked for the company took the other. It was the first experience I had of “living on my own” in my life. Anthony and I learned how to cook since we were eating way, way, way too much take out and junk food, lol. Anthony had recently been in a car crash so he had money that the insurance company had paid out to him. We used that money to buy a fridge and some other basic kitchen stuff so that we could cook and eat. We also used the money to buy a TV and an Xbox 360. This was just after they came out. We would all sit together and play games, talk about the world and talk about our lives. It was an extremely awesome and fun time in my life. After a while of us living there we started getting sick and the one morning where I didn’t sleep which was a normal thing for me at that stage – I would mostly sleep for an hour or two a day and stay awake as much as I could, I would also sleep during the day and stay awake at night – the one night Anthony was sick and coughing badly quite often. I was so scared that he would die that I almost broke into tears. I begged him to not die. I begged him not to leave me. I didn’t do this near him but in my room. I was still upset over Blackie dying – see my earlier blog… - so I was scared that he would die and leave me all alone in the world. Soon after this Bernard came to take me home telling me that I wasn’t ready to live on my own yet. This wasn’t a matter of age but a matter of stability in who I was, as I was using the flat as a way to run away and hide from myself. Bernard brought Anthony home soon afterwards as well.

After this we moved to the farm and Anthony came with at first. He started isolating himself more and more over time. He moved out of the room he was sharing with his partner and moved into a tent outside the house. He was less and less interested in the day to day of the farm. He eventually decided that he was going to leave and move back to his parents and try to get a job and find out who he really was. I didn’t take him seriously so I thought the whole idea was ridiculous. He showed me the things that he was responsible for and I took it over from him. He left and I barely said goodbye as I expected that he would be back soon. He got a job and his own little apartment and was doing ok for a little while. He didn’t like his job as it was a high stress environment and the people treated him badly as he was the new guy. He quit after a month I think. He lost his apartment. He sold his car, computer and whatever else he could for food and cigarettes. He eventually ran out of money and moved back to his parents. He would often fight with his parents and they sent him to a few psychiatrists since he was becoming more and more aggressive and forceful in talking to them about his life.

Anthony came back after staying with his parents for a while. He started working with us again outside and he also was busy making a few websites for us – which was another self-taught skill. He was still quite suppressed and isolated but he was getting better. He was teaching me to make websites. I was again more interested in his attention and approval then learning what he had to teach. I ignored much of what was going on inside of him so that I could try to see him as the same fun loving, outgoing, friendly, supportive stable man he used to be. I ignored his pain by seeing it, knowing it was there but not going to him and assisting him with his points out of fear of scaring him away and destroying the shaky relationship that we had developed. I was unwilling to help him out of fear of losing him. So I left him in his state of instability so I wouldn’t lose him. By doing that I pushed him away and that didn’t help him.

After about 3 months he “borrowed” my sister’s car for a trip to town and didn’t come back. He took the car on Friday and on the following Sunday we had to get the police to activate the car’s tracker to find him. We found the car and him at a shopping mall in a town close to Durban. We took him to his parents and suggested to them to send him to a mental institution since he had gone into a deep depression and we were worried that he might hurt himself. When we got the car back it was full of empty alcohol bottles and other junk.

We didn’t hear from him for a while. We needed his help with some computer stuff. He wouldn’t respond to anyone’s email so my sister asked me to try to contact him for help. He responded and helped me with everything I asked for. He wouldn’t talk about what was going on in his life he would just ignore the question. He told me once that he was busy working on himself and just wanted to do this by himself for himself. He was cold and calculating in his responses as if I was a business client. I backed off on the questions but felt that I could’ve helped him if he let me, but just like me he was stubborn and thought he could do it all himself. After he helped us with our problem he didn’t contact me again. He was on Facebook so I would check on what he was doing. He was going out with friends a lot so I thought that he may have stopped his process, so I figured that he might come back eventually.

A while later we found an article saying that Anthony had died. We tried to confirm it through old friends and his parents. I saw on his Facebook profile that his friends were all saying goodbye and so-on. I sent a message to his Facebook profile. I asked if this was true. I begged him for it not to be true. I didn’t want to believe it. I cried while writing it. I blame myself. I punished myself. I isolated myself. I told myself that he was my friend and I killed him. I told myself that I should’ve tried harder.


To Be Continued...