change

Embracing Happiness and Change

~ John Loraine ~ 3 Comments

It doesn’t take too much to be happy. Not much money and not much effort at all. My family was happy again while visiting Sarasota for the second time this year in July. I saw honest and pure smiles on my wife’s face. My kid was happy, too. He’s changed over the last twenty-four hours for the best. This is the place to be. This is the place to live and enjoy and be happy. Happy as one can be happy. This place, a thousand miles from our home, at the very South of the continent, is surrounded by water, alligators, snakes, golf courses, and the best beaches with the whitest sand surrounded by the warmest ocean with the most magnificent sunsets in the country, feels more like home than anything else. I fell in love with this place years ago, and every year, I cannot wait to come back there to just simply enjoy it. I think I found my home. It is here. It is in this ocean, in palms, in the humid air, sunshine, and the ocean breeze. My family loves to come down here. This place became part of my family tradition. This place became our new home. We are simply happy here. Period.

This year has been an interesting one, to say the least. Everything went a downward spiral, and I went down with it. I got fired yet again in early March and have been looking for a job since. The job search was, and pretty much has always been, a miserable experience. You are selling your soul to these corporate assholes for a stable paycheck and job security, and you try to stay optimistic and enthusiastic because you have to, and maybe somebody will say yes. Most of the time, you end up rejected. That is my story. Somehow I don’t feel like joining the workforce because I know sooner or later, I will get fucked over, fed up with all their nonsense and politics. I’ll be getting miserable waking up every morning hating my life, as the job is eating into my life, and the manic depression would settle over my head like the dark clouds before the hurricane. All those jobs, in my experience, ended similarly. There is no happy ending. There is no ending to that day-to-day working misery. It is always there. Fuck, how much I hate it all.

But the Gods were nice to me recently and gave me another chance. I’ve got another opportunity to prove myself in the corporate environment. I’ve got a new job at last. What will I do and how? I don’t know yet. Is that place the right place for me? I don’t know either. But I will be there. I will try yet again to make something work. I will try to do my best at it, and hopefully, if the stars align for me, I will make my history there and leave my mark. I hope everything is going to be alright. There is no reason to be upset. I am not upset at all. I am happy. I am happy because of this new chance and because I had another chance to spend time in my spiritual home, Sarasota, Florida.

In about two weeks, our lives will change. The change is inevitable, and it is coming, and we are expecting it to come and disrupt our family’s time together. I realize that as much time as I spent with my wife and kid this year, I will probably not have an opportunity anymore. In two weeks, each of us will have to follow our own direction, and our lives will be different. We are still a family, but life is about to happen, and it is about time to move on to the next stage of our lives. It is a healthy way of living. It is the way modern life works. We live here, and we have to follow those rules. There is no other way. I hope this change will be a great motivator for us, will bring us closer, and will make our time together even more pleasurable and precious. I know it will. I started to value my free time and my time with family only after I had the least amount of time to enjoy them. I cherished every minute spent, every occasion, every moment together. Sadly, when time is all we have and when you have all the time in the world, you don’t know what to do with it. It is only after the fact that you realize that there is not much time to spend on family quality time, and you know that you should focus on that more.

I am glad and fortunate that we are doing our best to be together and enjoy our life together. This is why we were in Florida again, and we were so happy there. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t have any positive or negative inspiration for the future, as I know too many things I just cannot control. But what I can control is today. I can control how I behave in all those situations and make my way out of all the pitfalls. I can control my present to the best of my abilities and make it something great to think and feel about in the coming years. Then I can look back retrospectively and reminisce about the good old days when I wasn’t prioritizing the modern society’s norms and all those rules of the establishment, and where I wasn’t concerned about the money or job situation, but I was simply focused on making the best of what I have and genuinely enjoy it.

Today, I am making my own history. Today, the history of my family is being made. I am in control of my life and my family’s life. I am trying to do my best to create all those great moments for us to remember, to make us better together, and to love, cherish, respect, and value every minute of our family time. And I think we are doing just great. So long as we are together, so long…

Depression

~ John Loraine ~ 1 Comment

I found myself in these same traps again, in this darkness, where the sun doesn’t shine, and I am lost as lost can be and there is no escape, and there is nothing else to do but suffer. Was this depression talking? It could be. It has been a good part of my life. It is present like never and relevant, and it fucks with me constantly. All these hours of meditation and calming this shit down work only temporarily. It’s like a sunrise in the morning obscured by shitty dark grey clouds that wouldn’t show the beauty of it all. You’ll look to see the wonder of nature, and all you see is sadness all around. You know you want to escape, you know this is not right, you know this is not you, but you can’t. You’ve been part of it, a significant portion of it.

Charles Bukowski wrote, “We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.” Everything will pass someday, somehow, someway. I hope it will. I never liked to be part of this, and this is not the way I am. It just fucking drags you into this mud and smears the fuck out of it on your face and soul. You try to wipe it off, wipe it out, but with time it doesn’t matter. It won’t help you. And you are infected with it. It’s on your breath and face and skin and soul and in your ears and your blood. It is fucking everywhere. You feel it in your chest and spine and arms and legs and brain. How should I deal with it? How to be free and happy again? How to stay away from it? I don’t know. 

I am never a sad person in life as I am trying to be as optimistic as possible, but I cannot sometimes maintain that frame of mind for too long. Something else takes over. Even though there are plenty of reasons to be happy and enjoy life when this fucking darkness comes over, I am down on my knees, struggling to get up and look forward. I guess I did allow this to happened to me somehow. Unintentionally. I was trying to make the broken and useless shit work, and it just wouldn’t, and as time went by, it hit me back hard. It won’t comply. There are many sacrifices to be made, and I think I’ve made too many. Too many to count for, but just enough to make me feel all that now and suffer. 

Continue reading →

Poem: Everything will pass

~ John Loraine ~ Leave a comment

Everything will pass,
Everything will go away,
Someday.
Nothing will be the same,
Nobody’s still the same.
These long and useless days,
These short and pointless nights
This everything will pass.
Everything will become the past, at last.
This line above is now the past.
This poem also is the past.
The dark and the light will pass,
The birds, the trees, the grass,
The sea, the trees, the smile and tears
Will pass.
The youth, the health, the passion,
The shame, and sorrow, the hangover
Will also pass, at last.
The future, the present, even the past
Will pass.
Time will tell, time will heal, time will pass.
The struggle, the passion, the good and the bad,
It all will pass someday.
Nothing is here to stay,
Nothing is the same.
I am never the same
As my life is never the same,
As my troubles are never the same.
Who gets to leave? Who gets to stay?
These questions will remain.
Just wait, just wait, my friend, awhile.
Look at the sky and smile.
I hope the sky will stay.
I hope the sky will never go away.

Poem: Into the nowhere

~ John Loraine ~ Leave a comment

We are marching into the nowhere,
Everything is black and white and anything in between.
The masks on our faces cover our souls.
They cover our minds and intentions.

We all pretend that we care but we don’t.
We support the system that failed us.
We represent somebody we don’t know.
We say things we don’t really mean.

We make heroes out of thieves.
We turn thieves into our heroes.
The law is something that doesn’t work,
Something was written and forgotten
A long time ago.

We barricade our future and our minds,
We are strong or at least we feel like we are,
We demand and we want and we will die for a change,
We need to have things differently
But we never change ourselves.

The truth does hurt and it hurts a lot, just like love hurts.
Our fragile minds are so occupied and so worried
That we don’t even think about it.
We move forward, we try to persevere,
But fail, as the system fails, as the blue sky fails.

With faces angry, moving against the establishments
With our fists to the sky and the voices screaming 
For a change, for freedom, for something.
We hope that the change will come 
And we hope that this march is the last one.

Time is all we have

~ John Loraine ~ Leave a comment

I am sure I am not the only one who always gets some good ideas in the shower. Also, I do find the shower a great place to argue with myself, debating on specific topics that I am having mixed feelings about or I am virtually trying to argue with my friend, for example. There is something about that place or the process, something about showering that triggers certain brain receptors makes them produce some interesting ideas and thoughts. I’ve been in the shower this early morning thinking about life. What else can I think at 5 in the morning? I guess that’s all I do, thinking about life.  

I was thinking about life and reflecting on the past, as everyone should do. We’ve made it this far, it’s December of 2019 and damn it, this year flew by fast. I have been quite a productive year, in a way; a lot of great momentums were there. I have certainly achieved things that I never was able to on the personal level, health-wise, life-wise and so on. Fuck, I’ve even started my own blog. How great is that? I’ve been running it for about three months now and I enjoy doing it. I will plan to do more writing and more posts as I go along. I hope to get my message across to as many people as I can and to as many people who might find the topics I am talking about relevant and close to their own experiences. I am certainly more organized from the writing perspective now. Posting a new blog post every week or two weeks makes me do the work. 

The end of the year is a great time to reflect on past life, on the year passing and think about the future. In the shower this morning I thought about it. I thought about my future and how often did I find myself seeing nothing in there. It’s all kind of dark, there is nothing to be seen there. It almost feels like the light switch has been turned off. I need to find it and turn back on and see what’s out there.  

Continue reading →