When Split Seconds Turn Into A Lifetime

“Every choice you make has an end result.”~ Zig Ziglar

There I sat by myself this afternoon. Rubbing my forehead and wondering what just happened.

Flustered, attempting to recall everything in my head to play it all back. Failing miserably for at least twenty minutes. Then minutes turned into hours of obsession.

Such a red flag as most of the day was wasted while attempting to make sense of things.

I was standing in line at a store and a young attractive woman caught my eye.

I observed in silence for a while. No wedding ring, no clingy 6’8” boyfriend around her neck, no children nagging for her to buy something.

As I moved forward with each patron ahead of me checking out, I keep as much of a visual as possible. And then it was soon my turn.

When I had purchased all of my items, I swiftly put away my wallet and suddenly saw the woman making a move for the front door.

I shot off like a rocket. Running over the toes of no less than two people that were within proximity of me and slamming into unoccupied chairs and tables just to reach the front door before she could.

She and I both would end up in the doorway with the door being held open by the both of us before I even realized it. It was a battle between whether or not I was being chivalrous to hold the door open for a woman or if she was being caring to hold a door open for a person in a wheelchair.

I motioned for her to go first as I pushed the door open with all of my strength, ready to catch it as it sprung back at me from its hinges. She thanked me and walked out and disappeared within five seconds. Meanwhile, I NEVER said a single word. I didn’t even get a “hello” out or formulated the thought to extend to her a compliment. I was left there with just a simple grin on my face as she pulled her sunglasses over her eyes and walked away.

A split second after that, I never saw her again.

Who knows what would or would not happen had I actually spoken to her.

In daily life, we all come across the point where we make split decisions. But usually, they are not so complex as the situation that I found myself obsessing about for hours.

If we are running late for work, do we still stop for coffee or do we press on without it? If we find ourselves in an emergency, who do we call for help first?

Simple examples, but important ones all the same. And it only takes a split second to make a choice in these matters. If we don’t get coffee, some of us end up being a real pain towards others at the office. If we don’t call the right people in an emergency, well as they say “seconds matter” and its true.

I keep getting reminded of the episode of “The Big Bang Theory” where Howard Wolowitz is on a train and he’s spotted a celebrity and he’s obsessing with trying to come up with the BEST opening “line” that he can think of. Meanwhile, his friends are just able to walk up to the celebrity and talk.

That’s the thing with taking risks. You never know if it will work out in your favor or become dangerous.

But then there’s also the other side of the process where I continually think about what could have been. And eventually some kind of thought attempts to relieve my poor brain with the idea that it was okay not to have said a single word to her because you never know what she could have done.

And its usually negative to the point where I think that I am much better off having not said anything because, she could’ve been crazy. She could’ve been dangerous.

Just at a point where I have thought that I was getting better at dealing with the idea of doing nothing and losing out on the possibility of everything.

I would say that in the last two years, maybe three, that I have taken a lot more chances and risks than I ever had in my entire adult life.

And as much as I really am tired of being disappointed or even getting to the point of devastated by people in one way or another, I know that the old saying about dusting yourself off and getting back on the horse just rings true.

There was an example of me chatting with a young woman who lived three hours from me. And within three days, I had taken a risk and made the suggestion on her traveling to where I live and go out. No promises, no expectations.

Hell, even me asking a woman out on a simple date has never been easy for me.

But she agreed, and the night that she was to arrive from out of town, she kept getting lost and the hour was getting later and later and later. Almost late enough to where it wouldn’t have done any good to have gone out on the date because I was aware that she had a three hour drive back home.

Still, I pressed on and had someone drive me to meet her at a central location.

What do I say to her? If anything at all?

The date was nothing short of a dud. Boring and nothing really fun to do because by then just about everything was closed for the night. Ultimately deciding to go to a beer bar to drink and talk.

It would take less than an hour to figure out that this roommate she kept talking about was really her boyfriend. And even at the end of the night as she dropped me off at home I didn’t waste a whole lot of time. I jumped out of the chair, shouted inside my gratitude for the evening and slammed the door shut and kept moving.

Making that split second decision to end the night as I did was probably the smartest thing I had done all night. Considering that later on, I would find out that she would travel about a half an hour away to meet with another man with whom she slept with and didn’t get back to her own home until noon the next day. Then that following evening, she was pulled over by a police officer because she was going in and out of traffic lanes due to her exhaustion from the hours before and it led to a search of her vehicle. And during that search, her trunk was found full of illegal drugs.

Those drugs were inside her vehicle during the time that I was with her. And that was something scary to think about.

It would lead the affirmation that when involving yourself with the possibility of meeting someone from the Internet, you DON’T make plans that fast. Its safer and smarter to take the time to get to know the other person for a long extended period of time before even considering that face-to-face meeting.

But this is only an example of where the decision of taking a risk COULD have led to a really big disaster. Not all risks that I have taken in the past couple of years have been so tragic.

When I have asked other people around me what they think about split second decisions, they always think about situations such as the “fight or flight” scenario. Those of you who have read this blog from near the beginning know that I have had a lot of those situations arise in the past few years.

It has been two years now since I was in that very moment where a split decision had to be made. Something that one could either call life saving or life defending. I defended and thus I survived.

The choices I made led to the decision of me starting this blog. And from it, I have gained a lot of what I would consider good. People that I probably would have never known to exist are now in some small way, a part of my social circles in my own personal social life. I find it hard to think about today what I would do without them.

And as I catch myself rambling, I realize that Zig Ziglar was right. There’s always an end result to each and every choice that we make in life.

We’ll make choices in our lives that are important and some will be less important than others. But they all tie up into a nice little road that we travel down the path of life.

I only wish that for myself that I would stop obsessing with these cognitive distortions whenever it comes to the situation of whether or not to chat up a woman that has caught my eye. Certainly, I cannot be the only one out there in this great big world that does that! Right? Although I would dare to say that I am one of few people that realize that what I am experiencing is a cognitive distortion. Others would dare to think that the other person having them are just whacko!

So yesterday is gone and it will not come back. There’s no way to wind the clock and actually pry my mouth open to say something to the woman that I held the door open for. I must take my medicine for it though. Hopefully I will also turn this experience to something that I will learn from. And I can acknowledge when I should speak up more and when I should back off. There’s always an unbalanced line when it comes to that because everyone is different. Things that are okay with some, won’t be okay for everyone. So we take the hits and learn the boundaries. Learn our lessons, and go on.

 

Mega Millions Mania & Why You Probably Shouldn’t Play

“We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.”~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Did you buy your lotto ticket? Are you ready? Being a little impatient for the numbers to be drawn? Do you know what you are going to do with all that money?

Guess what? MILLIONS of others have as well. They are feeling just like you! With 14 million tickets being purchased every singe hour. Good Luck!!

Nearly a half a billion dollars is up for grabs for the person fortunate enough to match every last number that is selected.

As wonderful it is to dream about what you will do with all of that cash, the harsh reality is that- you’re probably not going to win the entire jackpot. Your chances of becoming the next winner are so slim that you actually have better chances of dying in funky ways that one wouldn’t even consider.

Let me show you:

Winning it outright, the odds are 1 in 175,711,536.

That’s pretty huge, don’t you think!? I mean, if you bought over 175 million lotto tickets, you’d be CLOSE. But at $1.00 per lotto ticket, and you have spent that much just so that you can beat the odds, you’ve already got a ton of money and don’t need the near half billion.

You would have better odds of getting dealt a Royal Flush in a poker game, than winning the Mega Millions. And that is less than 1 in a million.

I think that my favorite here is that you have a 1 in 112,000,000 chance of getting killed by a vending machine. And that’s nearly the same odds of you winning this lotto.

But there are some very sticky situations with winning the Mega Millions jackpot.

Let’s just say for example that you win it all……… Well, congratulations!

#1- YOU BETTER HIDE! If you are announced as the winner of all that cash, you had better change your  cell phone, your home phone, your pager number, and disconnect your Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook profiles. Hiding is the only way that you are going to be safe from people who are out to get their hands on your winnings.

#2-RELATIONSHIPS ON THE ROCKS! Marriages crumble, so do your friendships and relationships. You have all of this purchasing power and even though the people in your inner circles are actually FAMILY, they will suck you dry as well. And because they are family, you will at first, be more than glad to help them. But what are you going to do when that one family member gets a little financial boost from your golden heart, and you begin to hear from them every other week wanting more? The lover that you have been with for so long will want to marry you quicker than you can correctly say “Absinthe”. And it would be for all the wrong reasons. If they cared, they’d love you just the same before you were the winner. Others who know you are the big jackpot winner will try to woo you in order to get closer to you. If you are the winner and are single, look out for all of the proposals!

#3- FUTURE FINANCIAL WOES! A lot of the times big lotto winners go and blow their stash. But instead of paying for every new home, car, and jet ski in cash, they use credit. And it ruins everything. Especially if the winner just keeps spending everything on credit and then eventually becomes broke and cannot pay their bills. Ultimately, they become bankrupt.

#4- HEALTH PROBLEMS! I am speaking more of mental health issues than anything. Sure there are those who just go crazy and live the party lifestyle and get hooked on drugs and alcohol… because they can. But sometimes winners will have to run away because those whom they thought were their friends, were nothing but greedy people. And now they’ve have turned down a dark path, having to BUY new friends. They become lonely and depressed. Especially if the money runs dry. They run the high risk for suicide.

#5- LEGAL ISSUES! With as many millions of people playing the same game out of so many states in the United States, there’s bound to be a couple of lotto tickets with the same numbers. And that will mean you will have to share it. You run the risk of being dragged into court because that other winner wants YOUR share! And you have to spend tons and tons of money to prove that you are a legit receiver of what you won. It could drag on and on until your money is vanished.

Now that I have farted into your Cheerio’s… allow me to piss into your Corn Flakes!

All day long, I’ve seen nothing but “Shared photos” on Facebook. These photographs were of Mega Millions lotto tickets. And they promised that if you “Like/Share” the photograph, you will be included in who gets the near half a billion dollars, should that specific lotto ticket be the big winner.

So I investigated one particular photo. It had over 200,000 likes and shares. Do you honestly believe that this person who has posted this photograph of their lotto ticket is going to go back and go through a list of over 200,000 names to give them a piece of the jackpot? No way!! They are going to get tired after going through a few hundred names and then give up because they see that there’s not going to be much of anything left for themselves.

Do you see why avarice and greed is one of the “Seven Most Deadly Sins”?

But the heck with all of that. I’ll take my chances of dating a supermodel. And that is only 1 in 178,100. A thousand times better than winning this Mega Millions. I’ll select Céline Dion (even though she is not technically a supermodel) since today is her 44th birthday, and ask her out to dinner. I’ll have better chances of having her (and her husband) saying “yes” to going out, rather than winning all of this cash. And even that is pretty big odds in itself.

Good luck, lotto players.

After The Wolf Stops Crying

“Cunning leads to knavery. It is but a step from one to the other, and that very slippery. Only lying makes the difference; add that to cunning, and it is knavery.”~ Ovid

 

In Aesop’s Fable, the boy who cried wolf involved himself in a selfish game of lying had eventually turned into a disaster when a wolf finally did show up and destroyed everything. Naturally the moral of the story was that in the end, liars will never be believed in again.

 

When we tells lies, we damage the trust and faith that other people have in us. As we continue to lie, there comes a time where those around us will just stop believing in us. They will stop listening to us. And really- who could blame them? Especially if those lies that were told to us caused a significant amount of damage in some way or another.

 

So then what happens after we stop listening to the liars?

 

Well first off, congratulations for being strong enough to stand up to that person who had been deceiving you all this time. It isn’t that easy! But then we start over and we say that we “learned our lesson”. We now know that we cannot trust that person because more times than not, they would lie to us again and again if we gave them the opportunity to do so. Even if we confront them with their behavior and tell them, “You are a liar!”, and then they solemnly admit to it… that’s not really going to stop them from doing it again.

 

But for others, they may now know that they cannot trust or have any faith in the person who had done them wrong by lying. And the sad fact of the matter is that now their faith and trust in all of mankind is gone.

 

I would never condone anyone to put up with somebody who constantly was damaging people by lying.

 

I watched over the past few years two friends in which the relationship had been destroyed by manipulation and lies. The one who was being lied to finally saw the “truth”, and walked away. Ultimately ending the friendship for good. But that person who had been burned, carried that sense of damage with them into future relationships. They simply will not allow themselves to trust another person.

 

I think that we all can agree that we would not blame that person for not trusting again in the same way. That person’s life has been forever changed. And the unfortunate side of this particular story is that this person refuses to even try to trust anyone else after being burned.

 

I do not believe that is fair.

 

There’s a saying that if you fall off the horse, you should get right back on it again. Loosely paraphrased.

 

Yes, you are hurt, angry, and upset. And it will take some time to get over it. But do you think that it is really fair that because someone else had done you wrong, that you should automatically start to believe that everyone else will too?? Absolutely not!

 

There is no good or real reason why you should live the rest of your life with your walls up. Because you will never find what good there is on the other side.

 

Let me repeat myself: Nobody would ever blame you for not wanting to trust the person who had or who has been hurting you.

 

And yet, to make the choice to believe that because one person did it, the world is going to as well, is nothing short of unfair and untrue.

 

There have been many times where I have discussed the hardships that I have dealt with in life because of this. I have mentioned them frequently throughout this blog. And I suppose that this blog post shall be no different. Many times have I talked about the hardships of finding someone interesting and then trying to get to know that person, only to have them shut me out because I posess some kind of similar trait to those who had previously harmed them. Which was something that I could never have known without being told personally. And therefore, I struggle to show that “I’m not like the others.” And many times I have come across those who are just cemented in their own thoughts that I can never show them what they need to see. So I end up hurt because I was never really given a chance in the first place.

 

You can take some kind of wisdom out of one of these two phrases:

 

Life is unfair.

Shit happens.

 

People are full of inaccuracies. That is how we were made. But allowing someone else’s faults to rule how we live our own lives after the fact that damage has been done doesn’t become fair to anyone else, not even to yourself!

 

We cannot stop people from lying. We cannot stop people from manipulating. But what we can do is know that each person is quite different from the other. And so how would you know, if you don’t give that next person a real chance?? We can stop trusting in those who lie to us, but we can give that new person a chance.

 

We do not have to put up with anyone’s behavior if we do not want to. That is the freedom of our choice. Masking the fact that everyone else is the same, becomes nothing but another lie. And this one you have told to yourself.

 

We can take the lessons that we did learn from the previously ending relationship and apply them. Once we start to actually see a pattern within that next person that is similar to the one we just ended all bonds with, THEN it might be time to stop and think about whether or not the two are having anything in common. It’s not fair to be quick to judge this though.

 

Those who have abused us, ruin it for the rest of the world in so many ways during so many times. We’ve got to really ponder about this.

 

Just because I wear red constantly, or black- does that mean that all people who are in wheelchairs also wear red and/or black?

 

A man found that his wife was cheating on him. He caught her in the act and then divorced her. He was smart enough to know that the relationship needed to end. But he was also foolish enough to think that ALL WOMEN are cheaters.

 

Do you finally get what I am saying?? Is this man’s perception of women valid and fair? Of course not!

 

That same man never married again. He never even bothered to date or meet new people. Needless to say that the rest of his life, he was quite miserable. He believed in the lie that he told to himself that all women cheat. And therefore he never allowed the opportunity for happiness through companionship in his life, and it caused him to be lonely and bitter. He should have taken his time to get over the pain of the loss, and moved on. He never knew what possibilities of better fulfillment through the companionship of another female could be like.

 

Let’s stop judging one another. Take the time to heal and then let’s get back to life as we once knew it. Don’t go on existing with closed doors and high walls around you.

 

Be strong and know when enough is enough. And also start over with a clean slate and a fresh mind and do not fall into the traps that everything is always the same.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carpe Diem

“Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards.” ~William Arthur Ward

A person can really go through a lot of self-induced pain and misery when the realization sinks in that an opportunity had been presented before them, and they did not take advantage of it.

We end up having the urge to kick ourselves in the butt as hard as we can, but physiologically we know its not possible, and still we have the urge. Others go to such extremes as to find other ways to actually inflict some kind of physical pain to ourselves because we know that kicking our own butts would hurt, and yet we some how deserve to feel that pain.

A few years ago, I felt that desire to kick my own butt because of something of a missed opportunity. I had known a woman for about five years, not intimately or personally, but socially and I found her very attractive. But because I was aware of a large age difference between us, I did not seize the opportunity to get to know her intimately. Instead, I chose the path of the socially acceptable person, aka “the friend”. And then after a while, this woman began dating someone else. I was genuinely happy that she was happy, and it appeared as if the her relationship was blossoming. Eventually, she would pop out three children who were fathered by this man. And with each birth announcement, I was still filled with joy for her. But the one thing that was missing was that she was unmarried still.

I would see her again later on in life, and find that she did have this many children by him. I was with a few friends and all of us knew her, and we asked her if “wedding bells” was in the future.

Her answer would stun and shock us. Well, some of us.

She said that she had no idea whether or not they were going to be getting married any time in the future, but she was ready for it and all he had to do was ask.

All I could do was nod and feel the inside of my own chest begin to collapse as my heart sank.

One of my neighbors that I commonly socialize with on a daily basis, actually had it right all along. He once had told me, “Do you know why you see attractive women with really, really ugly guys? It’s because THEY are the ones who asked.”

I began to recall the conversation in my mind as if it just had happened. I couldn’t believe that he was right. I mean after all, this old man has a reputation of being dirty and perverted- so what the heck would he know, right??? Well, in this case he did know!! Even the sick and twisted make sense once in a while.

I lost the opportunity for something, or for nothing. But the bottom line is that because I did not ask, I lost. Plain and simple. I chose not to go for the hunt and ended up watching her make a family with someone else.

And it’s not that I think that the father of her children is ugly. I don’t know the guy that well to make that kind of a judgement. And even if I did, I’m really not the kind of guy that would do that in the first place. It is the fact that he DID ask, and therefore he was the one who was victorious.

Carpe Diem – It still means something that is so true today, even if it comes from a language that is basically dead. We must “seize the day” if we wish to become successful in any adventure in life. Whether it is for family, for work, or for love.

Even if you don’t speak or understand Latin, there are so many other phrases out there, that are coined to help us understand better and allows us the empowerment of what we need.

“You cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs!”… who remembers this one??

Had I gone to that woman and expressed an interest, who the heck knows what would have happened. Sure, there would have been a chance of rejection. But that’s just part of “breaking the eggs”. And honestly, nobody will ever know what could have happened if I just stayed strong and chomped down on the bullet.

Break the eggs! Life will get nowhere if you don’t even try. And let’s not forget what our parents and teachers and educators taught us when we were growing up in school: “You will never know, unless you ask.”

If you are met with rejection, then two things:

#1- You will then know and it will no longer be a mystery to you because you know you have tried.

#2- You now can deal with handling your rejection, instead of having to suffer the pain and anguish of the missed opportunity.

There’s so much to learn in life, and in this case I sure did learn the hard way. And honestly, I didn’t have to. I made excuses that she wouldn’t be interested and so I balked from the chance to further pursue anything.

Don’t let life’s chances pass you by. Yes, I know that it is very difficult to understand just when an opportunity has come before you, or a chance for you take is presenting itself. But whatever it is– take it!!! (And yet I would caution to be smart about it too. Make sure it is what you truly want, then go for it.)

Don’t worry yourself about consequences as they will certainly come later. And so why worry about something that isn’t even there yet? Cross that bridge once you come to it, if the bridge is even there at all.

You have truly nobody to blame but yourself if you miss out on life’s wonderful opportunities. And yes, you’ll want to find a way to physically kick your own butt. But you won’t find it. Instead, take the chance of falling on your face rather than burying it in the sands of disappointment.