Missed you.

This past month, any opportunity I had to be stable, comfortable, at ease, was ripped from me.

Thank God.

Now, full transparency - I am not the guy who's writing you want to read if your goal is to feel motivated.

I am not going to sit here and go all Jocko Willink "RAH RAH I AM GRATEFUL FOR THE HARDSHIP" on you.

No shot.

Gratitude journalling never worked for me. Trying to find 3 things I was grateful for when you've got nothing good to feel is a humiliation ritual to yourself.

Family broke, relationship ended, 5-figure bills sent, and I'm SO grateful that the sun is shining!

Zero chance there's going to be ANY "positive mindset" when everything's up in flames.

And this month I realized... that's not really the goal.

Gratitude, in my opinion, has been completely railroaded by the self improvement industry.

It fails to mention that you CANNOT control your path - the day you were born is the day you were killed. An expiry date was set, your path was laid out for you, and you were set out on your journey.

So, with that realization, I was able to fully understand:

If your path is already set - if your goals are already hit, your "success" has already happened, and God's just waiting for you to walk the path and wind the clock forwards...

Then every "bad" thing that happened to you is FUNDAMENTALLY getting you closer to your goal.

Now, there's a key difference between this and "being positive" like the self help meditation gurus will tell you you should be:

This is NOT enough (for me) to sit back and smile when my world goes up in sparks and smoke.

Maybe you are stronger than I. Maybe you can find true gratitude when you have a gruelling 2 weeks like I have.

I can't.

But what I CAN do is laugh at how ridiculous it would be to assume it means anything.

Shitty things happen and they feel shitty. These shitty things are the prerequisites to your success.

Therefore:

You can feel shitty about the shitty things, and then MOVE ON knowing they're just branches to clear and puddles to walk through on your path towards the End goal.

Focusing on the good, being grateful for the things you DO have when shit goes south, in my opinion, is NOT the right move.

The right move is to print out the shit that's going wrong, nail them into your wall, and STARE AT THEM until they make sense.

Until you can truly understand WHY they happened.

You DESERVED all the bad things that happened to you, because you DESERVE what's on the other side of them – the success that comes from walking your path.

This does not feel like gratitude to me. My gratitude is in God, is in my family, is in my skills and strengths – NOT in trying to fake a positive spin on really shitty things that happen.

This week, I drove up to my family cottage in the middle of nowhere, stared out onto the frozen lake, and stared right down the barrel of all the shit that went wrong.

I UNDERSTOOD why my closest relationships blew up.

I UNDERSTOOD why the 3 letter agencies dropped the bills on my doorstep.

I UNDERSTOOD why God RIPPED anything I was "settling" for right from my hands and set them on fire to keep me warm.

You don't have problems to fix. You don't have amends to make.

You have a path to walk. A path that was decided ON YOUR BEHALF (thank God).

Your ONLY JOB is to keep walking that path. Is to be honest with yourself when you stray from it, and get back on.

It's to realize that you took the wrong turn in the fork in the road, and you've got a LONG trek back the other way on the wrong path.

So when shit goes up in flames, the goal ISN'T to grab the nearest fire extinguisher and "get back to normal."

You need to use it to cook the rabbit you killed the night before. To light your torch that will show you the path forward.

Go read the Barnes and Nobel self help shelf all you want. Go write in your gratitude journal until you feel better.

There are no answers. There are only questions. Once you spend enough time staring DIRECTLY into the centre of the question, the question will answer itself.

Back on the horse.

– RL