2014 Goals

One more day til the end of 2013. This year has been filled with hardships and heartbreaks. No matter what happened this year, my ultimate goal was to keep on a smile no matter what strikes blew at my face. At one point I lost my job overseas, and was hauling my belongings down a sidewalk to a friend's apartment a mile down the city road at eight in the morning. As it started pouring cold rain on me and my luggage, I ran for shelter under a wooden gazebo that stunk of urine, alcohol, and cigarette butts. It was a good hour of contemplating life, chain smoking and thinking. No money. No job. No home. Goals of returning home to Texas with a wad of cash, extra teaching and photography experience, and a good mental state of mind were demolished. And before tears began to tumble out of my eye sockets, I began to laugh out loud at the fact that I was mostly pissed off about sitting in an area that had no free wifi signal. I was more upset at first world problems?! That's when I realized, that it's OK. Everything will be OK. Being at the brink of a nervous breakdown was probably the best wake up call for me. It was time to edit my goals, turn my wifi-less phone off, and keep on moving. My grandfather once told me that movement is what keeps people alive. "All my friends are dead because all they did was sit on their ass all day! Me? I'm always moving! And I'm always living!" 

 It was almost instantaneously after my epiphany that the rain let up and the sun came out. I picked up my bags and left my little thinking gazebo for another lonely soul to use for a moment of contemplation. 

I feel as if I'm always dodging the negative bullets, especially at home surrounded by negative people who yell and cry all day and all night about senseless things. THINGS. There are selfish people surrounding me, and it's rare to see selfless and content people. It was during Christmas vacation when I looked around and saw that there aren't many out there. A few came to mind. A few aunts and uncles, my father, and a cousin. But the only one that struck as a human being capable of putting a smile on a face during the worst hours of life, the one who opened the door to anybody who needed a home or a smile, the one who's laughter could be heard from the other side of a crowd, was my mother. The mother to everybody, the mother of all mothers. I have been told by everybody that knew her that I was exactly like her, inside and out. On Christmas Eve, a friend of the family began to cry telling a story about my mother letting him have a home and treating him like a son as a teenager, when an aunt came up to him and slapped his back. "Don't do that!" She yelled. "We all know she is a replica of her mother and it hurts us all." Apparently it hurts everybody that looks into my eyes but it's taboo to get emotional about it. She was loved beyond loved. Because she was positive. And selfless. 

I dug into my own personality and decided that they were all wrong about me. I'm not as humble, caring, and devoted to others as she was. I've been too busy getting my own life together. But starting now, on December 30, 2013, I will be more like my mother. I will shape my personality to give everybody what I can emotionally. I will get the world around me to smile. I will show modesty and empathy. Rather than running away or shutting the door on negativity, I need to "kill it with kindness" as my father says. 

Ghandi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." 

And, if all else fails and the world around me is still bouncing around in shallow, bragging bubbles of  negativity and nonsensicality, I can just tell everybody to go f#%@ themselves. 

Let 2014 begin.