Then, there it was...

Everything was so different before that incredibly beautiful event.  One single glance at the news highlights of any given day was enough to clearly see how disjointed our humanity had become since the beginning of times.  Not only had every single culture on our planet become their own entity, but also every single individual within these cultures found a way to justify in their minds how to excuse themselves from growing into a more united civilization.  Man had become a master over his habitat and a slave to his ignorance all at the same time, creating a sense of arrogance and hopelessness that deeply conflicted with each other with the passage of time.  The very few that had learned to overcome humanity's growth paradox were outnumbered and relegated to the ranks of being unrealistic fools.  Then, there it was, a moment in time which had been predicted by ancient civilizations a long, long time ago.  Evolution in its most basic and predictable nature took over and one by one, the most sophisticated and advanced organism on our planet, the human brain, flipped a switch.  At first, nobody noticed when this happened since the first to experience the most evolutionary event in human history were actually a group of individuals that had themselves been relegated in society as outcasts.  The medical establishment's inability to adequately treat what at the time were considered mental illnesses, apparently triggered a self preservation mechanism in the brain of certain individuals, rewiring neurological pathways and connections in totally unpredictable yet amazingly advanced ways.  These original few could see far much more than the rest of us could see.  Their advanced and beautiful minds had found access to reasoning, enlightenment, and even higher physical dimensions that nobody else had ever before achieved.  One after another of these individuals started to awaken from their disconnected advanced mental states allowing their minds to interact with both sides of their environment, the old visible world and the new higher cognitive world around them.  Once these individuals were recognized for who and what the really were, man's evolved state, they began to take over the mess that we had created in our planet and one by one found solutions to our greatest challenges.  Hunger, poverty, violence, war, and conflicts were all eventually replaced with solutions that allowed our beautiful suspended blue marble to heal itself and become the home of a true and deserving evolved intelligent species.

December 21st came and the world did not end.  In fact, as far as I am able to ascertain nothing out of the ordinary has occurred to justify the incredible hype that Mayan Calendar theorists had promulgated during the last few years.  I'd like to say that I was never influenced by the different proposed outcomes, but admittedly, somewhere in the back of my mind I was actually hoping for something to happen.  Of course, that "something" was never "the end of the world," but at least some kind of global discovery or enlightenment would have been nice.  Something that would somehow steered a unified vision for the betterment of mankind in the right direction would have been my choice.  As mind bending as the paragraph above might sound, I actually think that our biggest asset as human beings is our ability to have larger than life dreams and then set our minds out to make them happen.

When I turned 50 years of age last year, just as probably all of us do at some point in time, I too made an assessment of my life's path and accomplishments.  How many of my dreams did I turn into reality?  How many of my goals had I reached by then?  Where was I and where did I expect myself to be at that point in time many years earlier?  I will honestly say that I strongly discourage anyone to do this unless you are willing to be slapped in the face by your own inadequacies and failures.  On the other hand, doing so also granted me the opportunity to create new goals and apply a new set of rules to my life, this time based on 50 years of life experience and a lot less ignorance.  To me it truly does not matter how many years have gone by, and much less how many years do I have left to live.  Instead, what matters is what I will do with every single day that am living right now.  The retrospective view of my life tells me that I am capable of so much more than I ever thought I could do, especially in the areas of my life that I have influence and surround me daily.  I can be a better father, friend, and companion to those that are in my life.  I can allow life to take its course and find within my everyday the lessons I require to be a better man.  Most of all, I can accept the challenges in my life not as punishment, but instead as rewards.  After all, within each challenge in my life I have become whom I am today, and looking back at it all, I'm very happy with my life.

I have no special abilities or magic ball to predict the future.  I have, however, lived through an incredible journey of love while raising my two sons.  In my path I have found incredibly difficult challenges that I never thought I would be able to overcome, yet somehow God equipped me with the right tools to deal with it all.  I would be lying if I said that I have loved every minute of my life, let's be honest, who wants to walk over broken glass if given the choice of green grass instead?  Still though, that road has brought within it the greatest gift of all, the knowledge that I am truly loved by my children.  With all of my flaws and all of the mistakes I have made as a father, my sons love me.  What else can I ask for?

Dad4Life