Category: Words To Live By

For a few weeks in a row back in February, I had this new weekly lunch thing going on with someone that had similar spiritual interests as I, until they suddenly cancelled our fourth gathering with no explanation as to why, just as I was walking out the door to go meet them. They haven’t contacted me since and my attempt to reach out to them to reschedule never got returned either, leaving me totally frustrated and sad.

Ever since, I’ve wasted countless energies trying to figure out what went wrong. I wondered if I said something or did something that screwed it all up. I questioned if I crossed some boundary without realizing it. I speculated that they mistook my words somehow like many people often have with me. I even assumed I was probably just too intense like I’m frequently told. Basically, I plagued myself with many self-deprecating thoughts.

It’s been rather difficult for me when it comes to making lasting healthy friendships. Something I’ve learned along the way is that I often look in unhealthy places, places where I have very little in common, or places that were intended for only a short moment of my life. In this case, I believe it was the latter, as I owed this person an amends from years ago and wanted to make good on it, yet also hoped I could make a friendship out of it as well, because they were a Christian and gay, two things that I often find are hard to come by on my spiritual journey.

During our first gathering, I promptly made my amends, which was graciously accepted. The air was finally cleared leaving us to enjoy a wonderful 2-hour long conversation about God and spirituality. When I asked this person at the end of our time together how they felt about me being a friend, which I see now was self-seeking, I was surprised that they were open to meeting up again the following week.

Our next gathering didn’t feel quite as connecting though, as I noticed they were less interested in getting to know anything about my life. Yet, I still asked if they wanted to meet up again the following week when our time came to an end that day. I was surprised to hear they did and when the next gathering arrived, I spent more time watching them doodle on napkins, look at their phone, and listen to the music in the restaurant than engage me in any real conversation. I even attempted to ask for a change of venue, thinking a coffee shop might help stimulate a better connection, but they were quite content to stay right there. Honestly, a person with a healthy self-esteem would have never asked to get together again, but I allowed this character flaw of mine to do so again, which is where this story ends with me receiving that brief text message just shy of our next scheduled time to meet up and no contact from them ever since.

Ironically, as I sit here and type these words, I realize that the Universe probably only ever intended for me to meet with this person once, solely to make my amends. Unfortunately, this shortcoming of mine that deals with making friendships often causes me to be blinded to the actual truth. Looking back, I can see the traits of this character defect far more clearly now, as I was the one putting the majority of energy into it and getting very little in return out of it. Truthfully, I never really had much in common with this person other than our love for Christ and God. Sadly, I’ve done this far too often in life, stemming all the way back to my childhood when I would have been grateful to even have a single friend that liked me and wanted to spend time with me.

So, as I continue to heal and work on this character defect, I’m choosing to make a declaration to the Universe and to myself right now that I’m going to be more open to seeing the truth with those I meet in the future. To not chase after friending those who aren’t going to put in the same amount of work. To not look for friends in unhealthy places. To not make more out of an initial connection than it was ever intended to be. And to be ok with letting the Universe guide the process of bringing healthy friends into my life instead, while in the meantime, being ok spending time with the best friend I could ever have, me…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

Do you ever get concerned about any of your personal identity being stolen? Have you ever had any of your personal identity be stolen? Sadly, I can answer yes to both, which is why I became immensely worried recently when I received a phone call from a CVS pharmacy in my sister’s neck of the woods down in South Carolina, letting me know my prescription was ready for pick up.

In the past six years, I have had my credit card stolen twice, both from hacked gas pumps here locally. I’ve also had my social security number stolen as well, where illegal tax returns in the thousands were filed against it two years in a row. In both cases, I felt so very powerless, helpless, violated and vulnerable during the battles I had to go through to prove my innocence and gain my identity back.

With the credit card thefts, I had to watch my credit score drop immensely by several hundred points and it took me a good while to gain my normally excellent credit score back. For the social security theft, it took me two entire years to clear my name with both the federal and state and now must file with a pin every year to prove it’s me doing the filing.

It really is frustrating that there is so much darkness in this world that people regularly resort to stealing identities to make money. I have known of some who have done this during their dark moments of life. They have resorted to doing things like stealing loved one’s credit cards, social security numbers, and even personal checks, all to make a buck off of them.

I’m thankful I never stooped to that level during any of my addiction-laden years, but unfortunately, I still have had to experience what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this low vibrational behavior. But thankfully, it was never by anyone I knew, nor has it been something I haven’t been able to come back from. It still is really sad though that we all live in a world with such dishonesty these days, where people regularly strip others of their personal identities, solely out of selfishness and greed.

It’s my hope that karma does come back around one day for anyone who lives by this lower code in life, who steals other’s personal identities for monetary gain. But I at least can offer my thanks to God that I have rebounded from all the times I personally have been a victim of this.

Oh, and I’m also thankful that the CVS pharmacy issue ended up being something quite simple for once. It was actually a misdial on their part by one digit that led to me getting that worrisome phone call.

At least for now, I can breathe a sigh of personal identity relief…and pray that God continues to protect all of my personal identify in the future…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

As most of my friends know I’m not a fan of politics whatsoever, which means I’m not very aware of most current political issues, although there is one that’s been hard not to hear about or ignore these days like I do with anything else political in nature and it’s about the proposed Mexico border wall.

Because I didn’t know much about this issue, I decided to research a little further and discovered a few simple statistics. It’s meant to be 1,150 miles long, 40 feet high, 10 feet deep into the ground and 1 foot wide. It’s going to cost $8.7 billion in concrete and $3.6 billion in steel. Labor is currently being estimated at $12.3 billion. And there’s also the actual rest of the land acquisition that will cost around $200 million, leaving a whopping total of $25 billion at the bare minimum for this entire project.

$25 billion!

It’s hard for me to fathom that a wall costing $25 billion is more important than taking care of the forty percent of American adults who don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense, or the forty-three percent of households who can’t even afford the basics to live, or the quarter of adults who annually skip medical care because they can’t afford it, or the twenty-two percent of adults who can’t pay all of their bills every month, or the 1.5 million who are homeless, or the more than 25 million who have a drug problem in this country, and so on and so forth. It’s also hard for me to fathom that a $25 billion-dollar wall would even stop the influx of illegal immigrants, as well as drugs and guns, because they probably would just find some other way to make it across the border.

In light of the main reason why this wall is being pushed so hard by the President, that being to prevent illegal immigration, my deepest truth is that I just don’t quite get it. Over the years, I’ve meant a number of individuals who were illegal immigrants and they were some of the nicest people who do the hardest work, and often for the cheapest wage, which for the record I never thought was fair. While there may be documented cases of people who are illegal immigrants that have added to the crime rates in our country, there’s a much greater share of those who haven’t and instead, have done the exact opposite to bring greater beauty, love, and light here. People who in my opinion have done a far better job of that than many of our own citizens, including myself when I used to be in the throngs of addiction.

Nevertheless, this proposed wall tends to remind me of an episode in the Brady bunch where a line was drawn down the middle of one of the kid’s rooms and all the anger it caused because of it. It also reminds me of when kids used to play in the sandbox and draw a line in the sand saying any toys on their side was theirs and theirs alone. And it even reminds me of all the other boundaries, borders, and walls that each of us have erected throughout our lives solely to keep people from getting to close, something that has most definitely created more disunity and discord than unity and harmony.

This is why I for one, am not for this Mexico Border wall and continue to hope that it will never come to fruition. While I absolutely don’t believe it will solve the problem the President thinks is such a major problem, I also feel it makes our country look even more segregated and standoffish than we already appear with the rest of the world, and maybe even from itself. Walls like this, or of any sort for that matter, usually only create more problems in the long run, which is why I’m doing everything I can these days to drop any of my own still remaining. Instead, I’m working on replacing them with open arms, as for so long, I erected such monstrosities that they always left me quite empty and devoid of feeling any real love and compassion for anyone or anything.

Regardless, for $25 billion, I truly hope for our country’s sake that rather than using it to limit our openness at our borders, that it will end up utilizing it for the many things within our borders that are currently crying out for assistance.

And maybe, it isn’t this Mexico Border wall that we should all be focusing on anyway.

Maybe we should be focusing on all those walls each of us keep constructing within our lives that continue to make us feel separate from each other? As maybe when we work on removing them, we might see how we are all connected and when we do, we’ll finally begin to realize there’s no need to ever have any sort of border wall erected within us or around us…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson