I enjoy watching people – from afar off course because their actions tell you so much about both them and their lives. For example I have just returned from my local shopping centre which was packed to the rafters with people who had obviously just woken up and realised that tomorrow is Mothers Day and they have done nothing to prepare. So naturally it was time to panic and head down to the local shops and mill around and get in my way for the better part of an hour. Also why do such occasions bring out people who have obviously never been in a shopping centre car par before – in fact some actually gave the impression that they had never actually driven before. And before you jump to the conclusion that this display of incompetence when it comes to celebrating made up days was purely male you would be wrong. There was an equal number of women running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I have to admit when I can do it from a distance I do enjoy watching people in a flap. In fact my second favourite free form of entertainment other than a boat ramp is to go to Officeworks the weekend before schools go back for the new year. They are full of parents who have woken up on Sunday morning and it has dawned on them that their little sprog goes back to school on Monday and they have done nothing to prepare. So they wander down to Officeworks supply list in hand and then are shocked to find out that everything they need has already been taken by people who are only slightly more organised than they are. Of course the fact that Officworks is sold out of everything us the fault of Officeworks.
I have a simple rule – if you cannot be organised for something trivial then it is impossible for you to be organised for anything serious. The demands of anything serious will overwhelm you and this is something I have noticed time and time again. People who cannot arrive somewhere on time generally have fairly unsuccessful lives because they have not learned the importance and scarcity of time. People who cannot use a calendar to remind them of things are, as one would expect scattered and disorganised. My universal observation of such people is that they are surprised that there lives are like they are – it would be a surprise if they were any other way. The same is true in trading – the mere thought of writing down a trading plan is an anathema to them. They would much rather just make it up on the spot because everything that is important is serious is made up on the spot isn’t it?
The issue to me is quite simple. You choose the sort of person you want to be – it is that simple. If you want to be cluttered and disorganised that is your choice. I have never met someone who has been forced at gun point to not take control of either themselves or their lives. Chaos is their default setting but it s a setting of choice. Granted the choice to be different or to change is not easy, its not supposed to be. It is not easy to break the milestone of toxic relationships,the burden of an unhealthy lifestyle or simply making sub par decisions about simple aspects of your own life. It is hard to stop accepting the lies we tell ourselves to convince ourselves that the current state of affairs is the correct or only one. Believe me nobody lies to you more than yourself and we are easily convinced of the lies we tell ourselves. We are easily convinced because it is the easy thing to do. It is much easier than deciding to get up an hour early and go the gym or stop eating crap or to tell someone in your life to piss off. These things are all hard but they have to be recognised first and this is the problem. My guess is that most people dont recognise these things as problems – their view is everyone around me is the same therefore this much be normal. This in part encapsulates the problem – people surround themselves with the wrong people.
It is no secret that I funded my university education as a bouncer which was a wonderful social education because it reinforced in me that large numbers of people did not think like me, nor did they want the same things out of life as I did. For example when I used to work the pubs in Frankston – a shithole in Melbourne, which to this day remains a shithole and is called Frankganistan by the locals. We used to get all sorts of patrons. There were the usual collection of young ladies in short skirts who would come in and dance around their handbags as one did in the 80’s and this was one of the perks of the job. There were also much more malevolent individuals who would take any opportunity to punch on and then be surprised when we threw them down a flight of stairs. They would then go home for the week come back the next weekend and repeat the entire cycle and again be surprised when they ended up at the bottom of a flight of concrete stairs. We used to have couples who each weekend would come in get absolutely blind – punch on with each other go home together and the come back and do it again. It seemed as if people were unable to work out that their lives were ordinary and were a direct result of their own behaviour. I accept that not everyone has the same level of either cognitive ability or insight but there must come a time for everyone when they look around and say this is not for me. And in an ideal world that might be true but we dont live in an ideal world.
The reality of life is that thoughts do not manifest reality but they do manifest your actions. They set the road map for both the sort of person you want to be and the life you want to live. In my world there really is not a lot of qualitative difference between the people I used to meet working in pubs and people who panic at the realisation that they have done nothing for Mothers Day. There is undoubtedly a socioeconomic difference due to the suburb I work in but the scaffolding that runs their lives is not that much different.
