L4t35t P05t - 2015.04.05




Make Every Drop Count


Earth Date 2015.04.05

Posted by Rich Wheadon | Permalink




Everyone is daily pouring lifeblood into the things they love or care about in an effort to express, seize, find and validate many definitions of life's meaning. Why blood? The other day I responded to a YouTube troll with a statement in humor: "Everything leads to death". Such a simple statement that has been muttered as a response to "soda will kill you", "driving too fast wil kill you", "touch that and you will get cancer" and other such statements we hear all the time. There's nothing new under the sun with what I'm saying here. But let's get back to the blood, because it's less about etheral and philisophical or religeous study and more about the nuts and bolts of every day.



Since every drop of blood we pour into life is simply one more droplet of life spent in a finite longevity then it only makes sense that we not waste ANY of it. Your blood is far too precious a commodity to spend it on worthless and wasted effort. The worth of everything you do is defined by you and therefore you hold all of the responsibility of placing meaningful value on what you do with what you have. I've had surgeries where hematuria resulted and was something I would deal with for days or weeks. Physically losing blood makes one weaker and requires sufficient time to allow the body's manufacturing plant to generate enough components to bring you back to normal. The expenditure of your energy on life goals and dreams has the same effect on daily life. Every day we march closer to our end of life (EOL).



"Your attitude is like the aroma of your heart, if your attitude stinks, it means your heart's not right" ("Facing the Giants" 2006)
The very first thing you can work on is your attitude. No matter how strong, wise or respected a person might be, the attitude is constantly growing. For some it will grow fragile and bitter perhaps even resulting in a person’s internal harboring of the victim complex. For others the personal attitude will become patient and helpful as it develops into the type of personal navigator which will shine among peers. These are only two extremes of hundreds that will play out in thousands of lives we each come to contact throughout our days. Choose the positive route and you leave behind a legacy. Choose the negative, selfish route and you become a heresy.



Make your footprint worth more
While working toward a degree in art/graphic design I was awakened to the fact that much of the artwork I would produce in my career would be "Throw away Artwork". The fact that ultimately the artwork produced for magazine ads and container labels would be tossed away as refuse did not remove the fact that my work needed to be created with an aire of excellence. Just because the visual candy I produced would have a quick expiration date did not mean no one cared about how it looked. Even though my career as a graphic artist did not flourish, I learned a lesson in my training that has resounded through every career move in my short span of life. That lesson was to always strive for excellence.



"Excellence" is open for interpretation but for the sake of simplicity it’s doing your very best with what you have to work with. All too often I have seen people completely locked up mentally and physically because they reach an impass between perfection and possibility. There is only so much detail you can accomplish making a doll house out of playing cards and pretzels so work with what you have and accomplish the goal. If you are working on a team of 3 doing the work of 7 then there are going to be some hurdles and accomplishing your "very best" is going to prevail over a result of "the very best" outcome. Deal with it, you have to feel good about what you accomplish with what you have. The difference every single time will be that you moved forward and did your best instead of quitting or losing interest.



Finish what you start
As an addicted tinkerer I know what it’s about to have dozens of kettles in the fire at any given time. I am constantly distracted by immediate "fires" and things that will be more immediately gratifying. Each of my projects that are works in progress are on a list and I attempt to move them up in priority whenever possible, but life is constantly changing about us and in my case it causes me to push project completion schedules around. Hobby projects that are more about personal pleasure and loose academic adventure aren’t what I’m talking about here.



At the end of each day we need to be able to lean back before we ease off to sleep and meditate on what was accomplished that day. At work we need to finish our tasks for that day before going home so that the day can truly be drawn to a close. One of the worst habits a person can fall into is leaving a job undone before calling it quits. There are exceptions, but the rule should stand. Either pare you work down to smaller pieces or find defined stopping points that allow you to go home with some resemblance of accomplishment under your belt.



Be proud of yourself
You are fantastic! You have to give yourself credit. The marker of your importance and acheivement is settled in the way you have been created and with the gifts you possess. This isn’t an invitation to quit growing, striving and excelling but more it is a cry to give yourself a pat on the back. We have lofty goals for ourselves and more often than not we beat ourselves senseless trying to reach them. Sit back and find the good things about yourself while you're building that list of shortcomings. You can’t walk tall and fight strong if you constantly revolve around what you have done wrong.



Your blood is a valuable resource. People are saved every day by those donating it, we all press on diligently because our bodies regenerate it. The worries of life figuratively "suck us dry" of blood. Maybe today is a good time to realize the value of the lifesource that flows through our bodies thousands of times each day and make sure each of those cycles we are using the resource to it’s best potential.



Thanks for stopping by,
rich