Learning to become at peace with myself took a lot of reflection on my part and how I viewed my life. My changed perspective on my life helped me to live a fuller life when I was able to view my past as a training ground instead of a broken, lost cause! My past became my teacher, and my present is game time in which I am well prepared. I used an example from my book, Wounded Soul, to talk about perspective.
-Excerpt start: Wounded Soul: The Book-
Fires are one of the most unique things in nature because they have the capability to destroy and renew at the same time. Fires have a way of destroying everything they touch. A fire will blaze and leave a barren wasteland in its wake. Every plant, tree, shrub, and bush that has touched the fury of its flames seems to be reduced to ash and charcoal. Nothing appears to have survived. Fires seem to continually ravage nature and are a part of nature itself.
From one perspective, they destroy everything within their path, but from another perspective, fire cleanses and purifies everything it touches. Fire is able to purge the toxins and impurities that exist within nature. We humans use the heat from fire to sterilize instruments to make sure they are purified. Fire is never neutral because it is always taking action, but whether you see it as devastating force or a purifying flame is based on your point of view....
It is the perspective from which we view or understand something that feeds us our feelings and emotions regarding something...
The same forest fire that burned up homes and destroyed properties, land, vegetation, and wildlife also cleansed the land of all debris, killed parasites within the forest, stopped the spread of nature’s destroying insects, and gave that part of the forest a chance to regrow again in a somewhat cleansed state.
I live near the cities of Arrowhead and Big Bear in California; these two cities are basically on the same mountain range, with Big Bear being at a higher altitude. When I use to drive up the mountain, there was nothing but pine trees all the way up, but one thing you will notice is that a lot of the pine trees are dead. They are not dead because they are old and ready to die. They are dead because of a bark beetle that bores into the internal part of the tree and kills it from within. One of the solutions looked at some time ago was to have a controlled burn of the heavily infested parts of the forest. The fire would basically burn up the infested trees, killing the bark beetles within them.
Fires, as terrible as they may seem, also help us to solve some difficult issues that we face within our environment. Fire has given us the capability to create tools and achieve advancement within the human race, and if we did not have fire as an element, this earth would not exist in the form we know it today. Fire is a vital element to our existence in this life, but then again, this is my perspective on fire. It is the perspective with which we view 'something' that gives us the definition and understanding of that 'something'...
Whether I view something as bad, good, or indifferent depends on my perspective of the situation...
Death may be considered a good thing for an aged, sick, old man, but death would be considered a terrible thing for a sick, young man. If my perception focuses on their age, then my understanding tells me that death is terrible for the young man but is okay for the old man. If my perception focuses on the state of their health, which is that they were both very sick and in a lot of pain, I might not perceive any difference in death between the young and old because my perception focused on the status of their health.
Perception is key in how we perceive things in this life. It was time for my perception to change in how I envisioned life.
-Excerpt end: Wounded Soul: The Book-
Changing my perspective on my life helped me to change my life. Your perspective really matters when it comes to you because all of the information that comes into you passes through your perspective! Whether you feel good, bad, or indifferent about your past, present, or future actions all come down to how you perceive them to be!
Charles Myles
BOOK: Wounded Soul: Death Lived Inside Me
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