Category: Words To Live By

It’s pretty easy to build an expectation for something in anyone’s life. Quite often I’ve done it myself and unfortunately, on many of those occasions that I have, I’ve also become overly resentful when they’re not met. Thankfully, I faced a situation recently with my roommate that I believe will help me prevent this from happening a lot less in my life.

The situation with my roommate (who’s also the landlord) was about a parking issue at his home of which I am renting a room within. In a previous entry I made a slight mention to what this issue was about. There’s an oddly shaped tree which mostly hangs over the half of the driveway I was given to park my car in when I moved in. While the tree is shaped beautifully and has strikingly colorful, white flowers in the spring, it also allures many birds to perch upon its branches and poop constantly. So unfortunately, throughout much of the year, my desire to maintain a clean and shiny car gets covered with long streaks of white bird fecal remains. In my first year of tenancy, this wasn’t an issue because my roommate had allowed me to park on the other side of the driveway and said he didn’t really care about the bird pooping issue on his own car. Somewhere along the line though, his tune changed and he took his original space back. My car then returned to the bulls-eye for every bird in that tree who decides to go to the little birdie’s room. About a month ago, I began asking my roommate for compromises to prevent this from happening.

Through our discussions, I learned the tree couldn’t be cut down due to it being more on the neighbor’s property. I learned he didn’t want to park in tandem and have to deal with moving cars around constantly. I also learned he didn’t wish to elongate the driveway into the backyard by losing ten feet of grass either. When I had asked him what his suggestion was, his answer had been to go get a car cover which did nothing more than make me extremely resentful towards him. What I wasn’t seeing was how those resentments were my own doing based upon expectations I had within myself on the situation. A few days ago, there was a final discussion over this issue where I finally saw those expectations and how they were creating the resentments I was feeling.

I had spent most of the day, prior to him coming home from work, helping him out with some things around the house. During it, I had come up with another idea of how to handle the parking situation. Most of that afternoon, I built up an expectation that he had to go for this option, especially since it seemingly in my own brain met all his requirements. Even more so, I figured he would be more apt to say yes due to the amount of things I had done for him earlier in that day.

Boy was I wrong…

While my roommate was quite appreciative of all the hard work I had done around the house, it didn’t translate into him agreeing to the idea I had pondered all day on how we could both park without being a target for bird poop. When my expectation that he would agree was not met, I once again proceeded to get very extremely angry and resentful at him and went out for a drive. There was only one thing I could do to calm down. I parked in a plaza nearby, bowed my head, and prayed to God. I prayed for love, forgiveness, and peace for the situation, for my roommate, and for me. Because of those prayers, over the next few hours, I felt a lot better and saw things very differently and with a more level head.

I could have been more grateful that I have at least been guaranteed an off street parking spot since first moving in, as there is no place to do so along the tiny street in front of his home. I also could have been less manipulative in my attempts to talk about the issue, instead of trying to use any work I had done for him as a bargaining chip to fuel my compromise. But most importantly, the bottom line is that I had spent all day in my head seeing him agree to this compromise. I had used my own thought patterns surrounding it and built an expectation that he had to agree to it. And when he didn’t, my ego took a blow and an argument ensued.

What’s ironic is that after I had prayed and been able to calm down, I returned home to find my roommate had already taken some time to research alternatives on how to deal with the issue. He ended up going and buying some plastic snakes to put in the tree’s branches which supposedly might help ward off those pesky birds. And he was wiling to park a little more forward thus allowing me to park a little further away from the overhang of the tree’s branches.

While I’m grateful that there’s a good chance one of these solutions will work, what I’ve realized from this situation is that the anger in my life surrounding an issue can often be based upon expectations I created in the first place. Sometimes it’s best to just take a moment and breathe, and then do a little praying to be able to see things like that a little more clearly. Because I did so, I gained a little more wisdom in my life and saw another way of how I can avoid becoming resentful down the road.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

The biggest news in the past few days in the United States isn’t about another murder/suicide. It isn’t about anything related to politics. It isn’t about any scandal. And it’s not about anything relating to the economy. Well I guess on some level I might have to take that last statement back with the amount of money being spent to create this piece of news. The headline on Friday for most major news outlets was the Powerball jacket has soared to around $600 million dollars.

With people buying dozens and dozens of tickets at a time while enduring lines that I read in some areas were hours long, it has got me wondering how many of those individuals are hoping that a win for them would make their lives so much better.

Here’s the blunt truth. Besides the 1 in 175 million chance of winning this lottery, the sad reality is that if you feel you life stinks where it’s at now, it’s still going to stink the same if you win all that money. The only difference is that you’ll have a lot more distractions now to make you forget why it stunk in the first place.

How do I know this?

I’ve lived it.

While I haven’t won some large glorious sum of money through a state lottery, I did inherit an incredible amount from my parents after their untimely deaths. Prior to their passings, my life was often miserable. I had a lot of baggage in it that was much in part due to my own doing. I surrounded myself with unhealthy people. I chased all sorts of addictions to find temporary happiness. I didn’t like myself and I did what I could to avoid that fact. When I inherited the money, it became a wonderful new way to distract myself from me.

With it, I bought cars, houses, gadgets, clothes, vacations, and more. And for a time, I forgot about that miserable person that existed before I came into that money. Unfortunately, having a lot more money brought in other complications instead such as higher taxes and friends that I wasn’t sure most of the time if they were only around me for the free things I gave them. Even worse, the more money I had, the more I felt like it was never going to be enough. Though all of this, my ego swelled and I grew more selfish and self-centered. And eventually I blew through most of what my parents had left me, leaving me in the same state I was in before I ever had a single penny of it….miserable.

Coming into a ton of money suddenly, does not miraculously make all one’s trouble’s go away. They only get masked and suppressed for awhile. Sure I felt great for a bit of time and was constantly doing new things and surrounding myself with a lot of people. But deep down inside, I was still avoiding those things that had made me be that miserable person in the first place.

It’s like the sad and lonely guy who walks into a bar and says he’s buying everyone’s drinks for the night. He suddenly becomes quite popular and as he drinks, he forgets about how sad and lonely he was in the first place. But what happens when all his money is gone and he sobers up? The people are gone and he’s sad and lonely again. The same thing holds true with winning the lottery or coming into any large sum of money for a person who was sad, or lonely, or miserable, or hating their life before receiving it. The principle holds true as well for any person who moves from one location to another hoping for a geographical cure from their misery. It holds true with any person who consumes any substance to numb their senses so they don’t have to think about the fact they don’t like their life. Happiness doesn’t come from any of this and especially not from $600 million dollars. While it might make someone happy for a time, it won’t last.

The only true happiness I’ve found in my life is when I’m trying to do God’s will. In that, I’m not chasing money or some other thing to bring me happiness. Instead, I’m focusing in on how I can not only help myself heal from all the selfishness I lived in, I’m also out there trying to help others heal too. Thankfully, I have learned this lesson and am not out buying hundreds of dollars of tickets hoping to win. Will I buy just one for the sheer fun of it? Probably. But the difference today is that my life is already getting better and much happier with God at the center of it. And so if I was to win, the only happiness that would increase within me would be when I reach out to donate much of it to others who need it a lot more than I ever would.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

I may not be a parent at this point in my life, but there was a time when I was a kid. Looking back at the many years I was living under the Dawson household in Poughkeepsie, NY, I realized there was one thing that was greatly absent throughout most of it……unconditional love.

My parents did the best they could to raise my sister and I under their circumstances. Both were alcoholics and both dealt with bouts of chronic depression and anxiety. For a person to be suffering from any addiction, there is one thing that is very difficult to do and that’s caring about anyone else but their own self. To make matters worse, having mental imbalances such as depression and anxiety only furthers the inability to care about anyone else’s needs, wants, or desires. So in the Dawson household, because of both of those things, any love that was present had a level of toxicity within it.

Much of the love my sister and I received growing up was given with conditions, meaning there was always something that was attached to any kind gesture that my parents might have offered…

“If you do this for us, we’ll do this back in return.”

“If we give this to you, you need to give us this back later.”

“If we offer you this, will you help us out with that later?”

Unfortunately, what I don’t remember much of because it wasn’t present often, were loving acts of kindness that came without any attachments. I see movies all the time with family’s that portray those types of values. A son comes home from school having been bullied and his mother holds him tight while he cries in her arms instead of being lectured to stand up for himself in the future. A daughter is dumped by her first boyfriend and her father consoles her with words of how beautiful and special she is instead of telling her what she needs to work on to hold on to guys like that. A child walks into the home office and asks to have a catch outside with their father who promptly gets up and takes some time with them rather than saying he’s too busy. The parents surprise their children with a trip to their kid’s favorite restaurant, just because. And those are only just a few of the many examples of what unconditional love can be all about.

As a kid I desperately wanted to have a lot more of taking walks, having catches, and getting warm embraces and consoling without having to bargain or beg for them. I desperately wanted to be listened to by my parents without them saying anything when I was really struggling with something, such as my sexuality. I desperately wanted them to just look at me and say how much they loved me just as I was and that I was good enough in their eyes. Instead, any love that was given came with a price attached, and thus guilt trips were introduced into my home.

“I gave you this, how come you are being that way?”

“I did that for you last week, how come you won’t do this for me today?”

“Don’t you remember I helped you out with that, so can’t you help me out with this?”

That’s not unconditional love. Placing a guilt trip on something later that one needs or wants and basing it upon an original gesture of unconditional love only will take away from the power that unconditionally loving act of kindness once had. Unconditional love is when something is offered with no expectations of anything coming back in return………….EVER!

Sadly, all of the conditional love and guilt trips I received as a kid became how I was with everyone else as an adult and it’s taking me a lot of hard work now to reverse engineer all of that out of me. I don’t want to live my life offering love that comes with a price. I’ve started this healing by doing random acts of kindness for complete strangers where I know I will never be able to ask them for anything in return. I’ve bought coffees and snacks for those waiting in the lines behind me. I’ve held the doors open at various stores for all sorts of individuals. I let people get in front of me in lines when they seem to be in more of a rush than me. I slow down and allow cars to merge onto a crowded road I’m traveling on. The more that I have done those things, the more I have felt the desire to go on a more personal level with offering unconditional love to those I do know. I drive friends to and from AA meetings. I help people out in the 12 steps. I take my free time to speak at various recovery centers on addiction. I offer warm embraces to those that are hurting. I do chores just because I want to help ease someone else’s burdens. Thankfully, all of these things have helped me to learn how good it feels to love unconditionally.

What I really needed and wanted as a kid was to be loved like that. What I got instead was love that generally came with a price. Over time, I became like my parents and learned how to love conditionally and often resorted to guilt trips to get what I wanted. Through my journey of trying to get closer to God, I have been able to undue much of that early on conditioning that came from my younger years. Today I want nothing more than to love others without expectations. I know I still have a ways to go. But with God at the helm so much more in my life now, I’m seeing that it’s becoming much easier to love unconditionally, and much harder to love with conditions.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson