Making Changes
change your beliefs and you change your world
My life has suddenly changed, except change doesn’t happen overnight, sometimes, overnight changes take years of hard work.
March the 1st is a good day to see that my life has changed. Today is a good day to begin to be happy. Today my life is sweet.
Please listen thoughtfully.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
this is a little picture of a truly sweet life
Survival from Illness
hospital is brief moments of fear interspersing long periods of boredom and pain
It’s my fourth day in hospital with kidney problems.
I see an oncologist tomorrow, I think it’s just routine. It’s also very scary
But, if I get though all this with my health intact, it will be a supreme and liberating experience for me; annulling routine expectations, providing new contexts and challenges, widening my horizons and opportunities. I believe that this scary episode is testing my abilities, nourishing my honesty, individuality, stoicism, irony, humour, fortitude, humility, and the complexity of my character. I hope I come out of this a much better person.
Above all this is a reminder of the shortness of our lives, and that I should make the most of what is left of mine.
Instead of being scared, stressed, and depressed, I should try to look on the bright side of things with humour and humility.
~
Jack Collier
jjackcollier7@talktalk.net
This picture helps me feel calm and peaceful
Card of the Day ~ Death
endings and beginnings, birth and rebirth, change and transformation
~
It’s been a while since I touched the tarot, and yet today I was moved to take out the deck and draw a card ~ my card for today. I was expecting something from the minor arcana. Completely at random, from 78 cards I drew Death.
The Death card heralds the ending of one phase of life to make way for a new one. It represents major change and transformation. The Death card can release me from people, places, things, thoughts, and beliefs that are no longer useful in my life, but which I have been hanging on to because I feared change, I feared the unknown. Another symbol which goes alongside the Death card is The Phoenix.
Given everything that’s happened to me already in 2020, and in years past, I’m now more than ready to be honest, open, sincere, and caring of myself and others. I am looking forward to taking a new path towards a new distant horizon.
I have been given the opportunity for major growth and learning. I intend to grasp that opportunity with both hands, and all of my heart and soul.
~
jack collier
jackcollier7@talktalk.net
Dawn, the end of night, a new beginning
If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes
Only I can change my life ~ no one can do it for me.
Life is about change. Without change, without variety, without some stress in Life, all will stultify and diminish. Without change there can be no growth, and without growth and development all things will wither away and die.
I will not meddle with that which I cannot mend. ~ Thomas Fuller
But, as the Serenity prayer tells us, there are some things that we cannot change, some things that have to be accepted, and the wise learn to know the difference. I can think of a myriad of people, places, and things I cannot change. In reality no one can change another person, unless that other absolutely wants to change. This is why it is mostly pointless trying to talk to most addicts in an effort to make them change their ways. This is why many relationships, and many marriages, end in failure and recriminations. This is why there are wars.
A while ago I resolved to stop trying to change others and instead decided to work on myself to become a better person. That is now my lifetime’s project, and it doesn’t always go smoothly. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes I make progress, and sometimes I go backwards a couple of steps or more ~ it’s like a man walking into a gale, sometimes he wins and sometimes the storm wins. In the last few days I think the wind won more than I did. In the last few days I went with the wind and my negative emotions, and that meant I really staggered in the wrong direction. In other words I totally fucked-up, again. For me, going with the flow is usually the wrong choice.
Life will do it’s best to deceive you. You may get knocked down, but you must always get up again. The mark of a really great boxer is not that he never gets knocked down. A really great boxer can get knocked down, but he will always get up again. And that’s up to and including Mohammed Ali in his all prime and pomp.
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.’ ~ Thomas Edison
The English language is filled with wise sayings, allegories, parables, and proverbs. As you would expect a lot are by Churchill; ‘To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often…’ Then from Scotland we have the allegory of Robert the Bruce and the spider, which gave us the saying; ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again…’ But we also have almost the converse of that saying…
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. ~ Albert Einstein.
The Goddess knows I have been there often enough ~ every time I took a drink I expected it to be different from the last time, and it never was. But, somehow I usually got away with it.
Back in my illustrious career in banking I once went into a meeting on Madison Avenue with no ideas and nothing but blank pieces of paper in my briefcase. I had got good and drunk in the Plaza the night before, so I both looked and felt far from my very my best. But I stood up in front of the board of the world’s biggest advertising agency and tried just one more time. I told them not what they wanted to hear, but what I wanted to make happen. It worked. The thing is I didn’t give up, and I didn’t try to change anything except myself.
After that almost debacle I resolved to make a big change by giving up banking for good. It was the wrong change ~ I should have given up booze for good. Back then I didn’t have enough serenity within me to even think about being sober for life.
Right now, today, all I try to do is be the best Jack Collier I can be, sober. That is difficult enough for anyone. I realise that life is difficult and painful. I know that the causes of my problems and pain are my own cravings, lusts, and the blaming others for my faults. I now know that I can’t change others and I can’t change what happens to me, but I can change what I do, and how I react to people places, and events.
I know that the warrior’s road to freedom from continual distress, pain, and suffering is through self-discipline in body, mind, spirit… and that’s a hard road to walk in honour, honesty, and truth. I try to always walk that road, and often I fail. But, at least I try, and perhaps not one in ten men even do that.
The world and the sky is ours if we want it enough.
~
jack collier
JackCollier7 
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