Coping with life frustrations

I’d like to think I’m a good person. I’ve tried to live my life in ways that reflect good morals and high integrity but often fall short. I get caught up with temptations, frustrations and situations that don’t reflect the character of a person I can truly be proud of, and, I often find myself getting irritable with things I have no control over. Life’s like this! You simply cannot control what others do. The only person I have control over is myself and the choices I make. Knowing that, why do I still persist in trying to control situations that drive me crazy. I suppose, if you’re like me, you have probably asked yourself the same question. There are a multitude of life situations that can consume our thoughts and behaviors, if we let them.

Conflict and respect

 

It isn’t too difficult to understand why there is so much conflict in the world. When you think about it, there is an underlying element that leads to most conflict – the lack of respect. There is a saying, “If you want respect, you have to give it.” This can’t be more true than in personal relationships. All too often, people don’t practice the “Golden Rule” which states “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Imagine a world where this biblical concept was practiced in every facet of our daily lives? What an enormous difference it would make in reducing conflict and allowing people to live in harmony.  

The fragile nature of trust

 

Life’s like this… seldom can you have complete trust in a person. This might be a cynical view, but in reality, it might be a healthy principle to live by. Years ago I coined the phrase, “Trust is the basis of all positive relationships.” In life, I would venture to say all positive relationships must be grounded in trust.  

 

Each of us are engaged in countless relationships, many that you may not be consciously aware of that involve varying degrees of trust. Trust sometimes is based on experiences that you have with an individual that has developed over time. But quite often, by necessity, we have to engage in blind trust. For example, when you are driving your car down a two-lane road, you have to accept by blind trust that the car in the other lane will be kept under proper control and not cross into your lane causing a head-on accident. On the other hand, someone who has demonstrated to you over an extended period of time that you can depend on them can be deemed completely trustworthy. Or can they?

The red flag is out

 

Well after losing 67 lbs since last March, this past week I gained 3 lbs… 3lbs just days before Thanksgiving. I don’t have to ask myself why I gained the weight: poor food choices, food grazing, and not eating proper portion sizes are the things I have done, but they are not the culprits — my decision to eat what I did is the root cause of my weight gain.  
 
 
 

Ordinary day with unexpected beginning

Sometimes a seemingly normal day can bring with it unexpected surprises and unexpected opportunities to call on special training or skills you have acquired along life’s way. Back in the 90s I had the opportnity to call on my military training as a medic. It happened on an ordinary day as I went to get a coffee at the local 7-11 convenience store. When I stepped out the door, I heard a man yelling “My baby’s not breathing!” I looked to my right and saw a man yelling into the pay phone but he had no baby with him. I looked around the parking lot and saw, by the gas pumps, a woman by the open door of her pickup with a panicked look on her face. I set my coffee cup on the car beside me and ran to the pickup.

Trauma of the heart

Pain isn’t always physical. There are wounds of the heart, soul and mind that are far more devastating than any gunshot wound or burning piece of shrapnel – wounds that often lead to a lifetime of inability to cope with the psycho-trauma that not only impacts the mind but every aspect of a man or woman’s life. Trauma that shuts down your heart leaving you with an inability to form close relationships or that tears apart the ones you have. Trauma that reaches deep into your soul, that incapacitates you to the point you no longer care whether you live or die.  
 
 
Life’s like this; trauma does not discriminate. It can affect every man, woman or child in various forms, at any age, from the most devastating physical wound to the deepest form of depression — trauma of the heart. Coping with this kind of trauma and living with it on a daily basis is an endless battle. Behind the smiling face of your family member, neighbor, friend or stranger can be an insidious disease that is crippling and draining energy and hope needed to cope and face the challenges of our world. For these people, it is like a puzzle where you can not find a place for a piece to make that puzzle whole. This trauma of the heart — depression, often shatters one’s life, like a broken mirror, into pieces that may never be healed with any medication or endless therapy sessions. It clouds their thought processes which impedes their road to recovery. Unlike physical trauma that often heals over time, trauma of the heart, of one’s mind, can last a life time.  

Hope in unexpected places

Life’s like this! I am sitting down this morning trying to think of a topic to write about, when my friend “writer’s block” decided to make an entrance. Lately, “writer’s block” has been coming around quite often, and truly, some friends I could do with out. So I decided to go on the internet to see if I could find a topic that would arouse my interest. For some reason I put in the keywords, “pictures of hope.” Immediately the image to the right popped up and it made me think, “Is hope really a one-way street? And I had to think, sure you could choose not to have hope and go in the direction that leads to despair, or you could follow that one-way street down the path of hope.

Facing peer pressure and the consequences

Sometimes in life you can find yourself in a situation where you are given the opportunity to learn a life lesson. When I was on the DMZ of Korea, way back in 1969, I learned a lesson in accepting responsibility. I was 18 at the time, in many ways naive, and simply unwise in some of the choices I made. I was a medic for the 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, “Keep Up The Fire,” of the 2nd Infantry Division. I was serving as duty driver for our unit physician on the day I violated two new directives that were each punishable by an Article 15, a form of non-judicial punishment. I found myself in this situation because I allowed peer pressure and the notion that I wouldn’t get caught to influence my actions.