Photo by terrasidius [cropped]
So often we log in to our email accounts with a little spark of excitement in our bellies, eager to see what the world has sent us.
Unconsciously, we think we will find the missing piece there… a message that will take us by the hand and show us what to do.
It’s a fantasy played out across millions of computers every hour of every day.
But it doesn’t work that way.
The inbox isn’t where you go to change the world. It’s where you go to distract yourself, to lose yourself in other people’s wills and agendas.
So stop living in your inbox. As a dream manifesting platform, your inbox is broken.
Stop waiting for things to “happen” to you, and start “happening” to others.
Start living in your outbox.
We need to hear what you have to say.
***
Bryan Ward is the founder of Third Way Man and author of the LIT Black Paper
How relevant!
I am broken. I am the sheer cloth draped over a dead shell of a being. Without this cloth, the soul will seep through and dissipate into the black, failing sun. I have time to check my email. I have very little else to do. My days are a canvas waiting for the brush strokes of life, yet as the day goes by, a few dabs of grey and an occasional blotch of blood red. My email is for two different accounts. The first was personal. In it I find little of value, maybe a few notifications from my daughters school (I stay involved, but feel transparent, ineffectual). Sporadically I check my personal email to see if there is any correspondence from my lawyer. Child custody is the only reason my lawyer would offer such transmissions. But are becoming few and far from the steady norm. The rest is junk/SPAM/ refused or deleted. Lets face it, how many porn sites can there actually be, wanting me to enlarge my useless manhood, wanting to chat with ME or fixing to tie the knot with ‘this’ ghost behind the screen? The junk mail almost always gets deleted as a whole, rarely reviewed as any single piece of information.
The second email account that consumes my time, as far as I allow, was ….”WAS” my work inbox. It used to be filled with job interviews, work related research, market products, tooling and the list goes on and on. The “work email” had the spark of my eye. I used to look forward to working, to being productive, to being ‘needed’, to EARNING what was necessary to live. I loved focusing on my strong aspects and being appreciated for my talents and experience. All that was once giving me purpose lies in the past. Now my work email status is much like my life….ignored, junk and out of prime. I sit looking past my laptop to view outside my window. There ARE palm trees and sunlight. I view past hurricane glass to a greenery of tropical trees and expanse of blue that shimmers from the water. My agenda has been concentrated to “keeping up” with my emails and doctors appointments. I move about the living area to regain my circulation. Mobility is hard earned, like much of my past. The darkness of my past creeps up from the floor, seizing my ankles and knees as I grind into the kitchen. The calendar and the clock are faceless reminders that grin and stare at me as I prepare our lunches, time is moving far past the speed of light.
My life is actually travelling at the ‘speed of darkness’. As we traipse through our schedules, doing what is ‘expected’ of us, I feel time speeding up, exponentially. My daughter is in a different state of the Union. My girlfriend is performing her “magic” by working remotely, being more than just a breadwinner in this duo, she is my rock. But she must work to help with the bills, survival and her sanity, too. She has a purpose. She is needed. Constantly meeting or exceeding her expectations, she holds high title and EARNS her way through life. My estranged wife is still a part of my life, only, at least through my teenage daughter. The “Ex” is a term we all use loosely. Even after 9 years of being separated and several attempts to bury the dead marriage, she hangs on. She claws at the notion that the windfall is coming. The “Ex” has very twisted values of responsibility, money and what a PARENT actually is.
My daughters mother is the one of a few that adds “life” to my inbox. Life may also be construed as activity. Though because my mind is only a few things left that I like to escape to, my mind is telling me to comply with answering the drudgery of the inbox. The life I left behind IS something I want to let die. Alienation, custody, money lack of common values are all that she deals with. I am left to deal with ‘her’. My only hope for the rest of my hours, is that the women in my life know their value. As I sit click clacking the think box, hammering away on a small cross section of my time on this planet, I chronicle the hours by sharing my ‘inbox’ with any who want to give their time.
I need help. I want to find the strength in my being to shun the inbox life that hangs around my wrists and ankles like a red hot branding iron. I am extending my hands skyward to ask a god in the area to help me free myself from the life I lived. I only want to feel my face in the sun, not to bask in the glow of a blank monitor that reminds me of the life I reject. The life that rejects me.
Help me go backwards, there is a man in there….somewhere