The Bottom

Where exactly is the “bottom” that we have to reach before we start to come back up? Is there one? There are days when I wonder if I have hit it or whether or not I have farther to go. I have no steady job right now, no money, one vehicle which is in serious need of repair, a second which was involved in an accident and was totaled and a house that needs some work including a new roof. I owe people money including the government, federal, state and local and family.  As I write this I am a few days from getting my electricity shut off and we are wondering how we will pay for gas so the one of us who is working can get to work. Am I at the bottom? Or is there farther that I can fall?

On the bright side I have a woman who loves me and sticks by me through everything, I no longer drink like I once did and I no longer indulge in the bad behaviors I once reveled in. Have I been lower? That’s hard to say, I have had some pretty low lows. Like the winter right after my divorce, when I had no job, no woman who supported me and had to decide whether to pay the electric bill to stay warm or to eat. Giving up drinking wasn’t an option so there were some cold and hungry nights.

But the main difference isn’t having someone with a job living with me and supporting me both financially and emotionally, although that certainly helps, rather it is the change I have had in attitude. Now maybe that isn’t all that special, after all we can all change our attitudes. There are probably thousands of motivational books, videos and speakers out there which will certainly help anyone, no matter how bad of an attitude they have, to change it. And as one who actually read some of those books and listened to those motivational speakers, while they can change your attitude, there are forces which are more powerful than anything you’ll read or hear about which will change your attitude right back worse than it was. Or, there are powerful forces which can help you keep it positive.

There are good forces and bad forces at work in our lives every day. We must learn to ignore the bad forces and nourish the good ones. But first we must be able to tell them apart. We must distinguish between the good and the bad. Sounds simple, but it isn’t. Life seems to be full of grey areas. Black, white and grey. It’s when we get into those grey areas that we run into trouble. After all it should be easy to tell right from wrong, good from bad, this is obvious isn’t it? We know we should never kill anyone right? What about when we are in fear for our life, or our spouse’s or more importantly our children’s lives? A grey area. We are taught when we are young we should never steal, stealing is wrong. But what happens if we have had nothing to eat for a week, or again, our kids haven’t? A grey area.

Many of us live our lives in grey areas without realizing it. This book is for those in the grey area. I am convinced there are three types of people in this world. I worked for several years in the security business and through astute observation of the nature of people I concluded there are three types of people. The first group consists of the ones who are inherently good, always have been and always will be. Not only will they never do anything wrong, they will go out of their way to do good deeds and they will never stray into the grey area. On the other end of the spectrum is the second group, those who are inherently bad. These people have no trouble with breaking the law, doing things which are wrong, and while they stray into the grey area, they are mostly leaning to that black side. And then there is the third group, the biggest one, those in the grey area. These people won’t normally do anything wrong, most of the time they are honest people, but they can be tempted. They can be convinced that there are certain times (the grey area) when they can break a law, do something wrong, they can justify bad, immoral or illegal behavior. I can say this is the group in which I spent most of my life. And where am I? Go back and read the first few paragraphs to refresh your memory. Why have I fallen so far down? From living in the grey area.

Looking back over my life, and all the mistakes and bad decisions I have made, I now realize two things:

1.          I can’t go back, I can only go forward. I can’t change what has been done; I can only make certain I don’t repeat the mistakes.
2.          I believe all my problems stem from one bad decision I made early in my life. Had I not made that mistake, I truly believe my life would have turned out different.

Life is a journey. It is full of twists and turns, sometimes we make the right turns, sometimes we don’t. It is how we deal with the wrong turns that will determine where we will end up. While we can’t change the past, it is good to look back to see where we may have made those wrong turns and how we might have avoided them. I have and can trace my mistakes to one bad choice I made when I was younger. What follows is a description of what I have been through, how I have gotten to where I am now and how I realize what went wrong and the choice I should not have made.