During the Ultimate Blog Challenge I requested some help from fellow writers and bloggers in the form of guest blog posts. Within a matter of hours I was contacted by Bryan William Myers who was kind enough to create a post for the Literary Yours blog.
I requested a range of topics to be covered including working from home, managing family and work life, SEO and inspirational pieces. Since all month my blog posts have been concerning copywriting, blogging and social media I feel this is the perfect first post for February which should provide a little welcomed relief and a little spring in your step for the month ahead. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did when it appeared in my inbox,enjoy.
What Are We Missing?
What to do about all the time we have, or don’t have, for things we enjoy the most? It would only be fair to write from my own experience. All around me, it seems that people undertake their days at the behest or their jobs, bills, vices and shortcomings. But what of our ambitions and desires? There appears to be a gap, albeit of different lengths for different people, between what we want to accomplish and where we currently stand, resounding frustrations of guilt and missed opportunities.
Walls are placed around our bodies, and our minds. We tuck ourselves into shells and become busied with what we “have to do” in order to achieve a desired result. The physical walls that keep us warm and safe are necessary to live; we need shelter, and without heat, we wouldn’t have the strength in our bones to write out our lives, create stories and solutions, or have the drive needed to attempt to be successful in our endeavours.
What am I trying to convey?
Life is a give and take. We try to focus our attentions and habits on things we enjoy; but, we also sometimes find ourselves in the position of having to take what we can get. Was there ever a time you were caught off-guard, financially? Unprepared for that car accident in the rain? There are people out there struggling to keep themselves in their homes, desperate to remain secure in their livelihoods. There are others entering the job market with a degree, finding that that market barely has a pulse. Eyes-wide, they turn to something more practical for job-seeking. It wasn’t their first choice, but everybody has to eat; everybody deserves a warm nest to ease into at night.
This is the crisis that won’t slip out of our towns and cities, no matter how much it is ignored from our consciousnesses. We all should be provided with the opportunity to be able to pursue what makes us happy, energetic and human. But there are friends and family members in my life that have to endure through mundane tasks, arbitrary hours, and flatly, things that they don’t want to do. It can be deflating to witness those around us going through any kind of mental suffering. Being self-employed – attempting to carve out a personalized niche – means that others, perhaps, look to us with a benevolent, desirous jealousy. They are doing what they feel they must, in order to have certain things that they need to survive. Working for yourself can be inversely stressful, as I can attest to. Where others are secure, I am constantly plagued with reinvention.
In order to evolve and move forward through this challenging, changing modern world, we must become more creative in how we find new paths to emotional and mental freedom. Otherwise, we just end up feeling stuck. Days and months could pass, with longing for something better and more fulfilling, or, we could take our interests and turn them into something we fully stand behind, with relentless dedication. If you put all your heart and soul into whatever charges them the most, I’d offer that those two energies are hardly ever incombustible. And that’s what I observe to be missing!
Let your most sincere energies build what you want from your life. The rest of the walls will follow, hopefully. But, you won’t ever know, until you decisively try.
Bryan is a 25 year-old, living in New Jersey. He writes original songs, poems, short stories, and has worked in music as an audio engineer since 2008, having attended The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, OH. Currently, he is aiding his younger brother in the start-up of a small, self-made magazine consisting of poems, essays, and other writings. Bryans' blog can be found here.
* As Bryan is from New Jersey (like my favourite band when I was 12) his submission was written in American English and I have changed it to UK English purely because I am based in the UK.
