Places...

Places is an exercise in defining the perfect place for me. Where I want to be, spiritually, financially, and physically.  So today I'm going to take a little journey and lay the ground work.

Spiritually, I'm lost.  I thought I knew what I believed and why, but all of that has recently been challenged in the past couple of years.  I am no longer sure about afterlife's and living against a certain set of preordained rules.  All I do know is that I'm here, I can make a difference for myself and others and that I do things (my actions) are centered around doing good for the sake of being the person I want to be treated as.  I don't live my life as in I may burn in hell for not doing certain things or living a certain way, but rather I live like the universe as a whole gives and takes from us, only what we give or take from it.

Is that to say I don't believe in a God?  No, not necessarily.  I do believe in some higher being, but I don't believe he's puppetting us around like dolls on strings.  I don't believe my destiny is selected for me; I believe I make my own destiny with the decisions I make and each path is new and unexplored until I make those choices.  I have no ill will to people who believe in one thing or another.  I don't try to convert them and ask they respect the same wish from me.  I just choose to believe that we are all here in this universe together, making our own way, learning as we go.  Some choose to find comfort in religious methods; I simply find comfort in the world around me.  I could write two blogs to cover all this content so I'll stop here and get on with it.

Financially, I'm OK. I'm not great, I'm not rich but I'm also not poor.  I have a roof over my head, we survive with food, water, heat, and other luxuries some do not have.  For that, I consider myself fortunate and never complain.  Sure we'd all like to be better off, never worrying about this thing or that when it comes to finances.  Realistically though, most of us will just "get by" in life and that's OK for me.  I have started researching things for my future such as investing and retirement, but even there, I'm not looking to be a millionaire.  I just want to be comfortable within my own home with my family surrounding me.  That is both spiritually and financially satisfying.

Physically, I'm out of shape and I need to do something about it.  A good friend of mine said the most important 5 words I've heard from anyone about my weight and my physical being; "You are now a statistic."
Plain and simple.  No malice, or intent.  Just simply that I have become a statistic like so many other Americans today.  I'm over weight, have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, migraines, and at just 40 years of age, low testosterone and osteoarthritis.  I'm the poster child for how not to be healthy.  I can blame it on a lot of things, depression mostly, but what good does that do?  It just delays the inevitable; a slow but early death.  It hurts to type that.  It hurts to re-read it. But the truth does hurt and sometimes it takes pain to get motivated.  I'm doing what I can to make a difference in my life in more ways than one, but becoming healthier is a number one for me now.  I have kids that I need to see grow up and I expect to be a damn good grandfather one day.  I have to make those changes or I'll never live to see it happen.

One of these days, I'd like to move out of Florida.  Simply put, I hate the state, the weather, everything about it.  I'd like to live in the mountains somewhere in my future, but still be close enough to the beach to see the ocean once in a while.  I mention this because I think it fits within the physical category as well.  Your surroundings have to be pleasant and calming or you will never find peace within yourself.  Right now, I can find only so much peace.  It may be enough, but the mountains call to me every year and each year it gets stronger and harder to resist.  So, at some point, when I've straightened out other aspects of my life, I plan to make a life changing move to somewhere more peaceful.

These are the places I'm going.