Turning it around…

Man, I got a great email today from my friend Craig Holiday. I love when I read something that shakes me to the core. I used to hate it. I’d much rather delude myself in entertainment, food, whatever. But now, the mirror is up and I’ve found that the initial fear of taking a look is not only not as bad as I’d anticipated, but the idea of waking up one day realizing I’d only lived 1/10th of my life is just unacceptable.

As another of my dear friends Tony Horton has said, “I feel sorry for the people who just don’t have the information. It’s one thing to know and then make your decision but when you’ve never even discovered the possibilities…”. I couldn’t agree more.

I was listening to Jim Rohn in the gym 2 days ago, hey Jim in the gym!!! Haaaaa. But anyway, as Rohn points out, there are books, audio, materials on everything we need to change our lives. Anything. And people won’t do it. Amazing. Maybe they don’t need to change… (that doesn’t sound like a human being to me). Everybody would like to change *something*.

And this is only being pointed at myself. The days when I didn’t want to change, or knew I should and wouldn’t…

In rehab back in ’86, yes, I’m one of those… I remember a seminar on denial. I thought I was 1 step ahead of them… They weren’t going to get a *gotcha* on ME! I KNEW I had a problem. No denial there! And then they explained the many flavors of denial.

1st is the kind when you don’t know you have a problem, well, as I said, I was ahead of that curve, I knew. And look at MY king size ego, sitting in rehab thinking maybe I was a little *better* than those poor souls who didn’t even know… I was there because I was going to get my life together. Brand new gig, brand new GREAT GIG! “Will You Still Love Me” was climbing up the charts… (I actually heard it the first time on the radio IN my room in rehab with my roommate sitting there… You should have seem his face when I told him it was me! EVERYBODY in rehab is the biggest liar on the planet so he thought he was hearing another one! Haaaaaa, when I think back on that moment…)

But anyway, getting back to denial… They move to the next levels and when thy said, “And then there’s the person who KNOWS they have a problem…. (drum roll please), and won’t do anything about it…”. Bullseye… I went from thinking I was cooler than the others, one step ahead to realizing I was the most pitiful, pathetic kind… knowing I was cooked but wouldn’t do anything about it… actually, I was doing something about it… I checked into rehab but I think that was the real turning point, of not giving myself an *out*… no reserving a place in my brain of getting back to the bad life I’d lived previous.   I’ve never been the same since.  I was caught. The mirror was finally hoisted up in front of my whole body.

And believe me, I wrestle with deluding myself like everybody else does. Luckily, I have remained sober for these past 25 years… An now, it’s about food… That’s my drug of choice. I slip up, self destruct but always go back to the info. The people, and I works.

So here is what Craig sent out today. It’s from Og Mandino’s “Greatest Miracle in the World.”

Again, my preface is that this message is not pointed at anybody but me… It works for me…

“Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can come back from the dead…”