Thursday, August 18, 2011

I had a dream!


Your Mom said it, your Father believed it: you can’t be in two places at the same time.

Fighting and making up are separate islands. There can be no peace until there’s equal acceptance from both sides of the white picket fence.

You can fake a smile but someone who’s faithfully jovial can easily spot a fake. Just like I believe “anyone” can do radio and television, those involved are either clock watchers or physically making waves.

You can’t be in two places at the same time. At fourteen I got into the business because of an addiction to collecting 45’s and albums not to generate a simple thought capable of flipping the mood swing switch in the never ending changes of a passerby.

To be or not to be isn’t the question; it’s a clear statement that blatantly states: you can be only one thing. Try and nicely shove that into the face of your Corporate American gatekeeper.

Being “one” isn’t impossible but looked upon as being weak or selfish.

I can’t imagine what truly grows within the lines that make up the stories you carry.

Rather than step on the scale to measure body fat pick up a pen and see how heavy your unspoken vocabulary truly is.

Author Lou Solomon clearly paints the trail when explaining human pain is the result of self obsession. When we try to understand the world from within, we create anxiety over looking bad and not getting what we want.

Lou says, “The answer isn’t to struggle. The answer is to focus outward.”

Instantly my mind is taken to the mat! At second degree, a martial artist is trained to put their focus not on the aggressor’s initial attack but rather three to five steps ahead of present. Not only do I fall properly but while flying over someone’s shoulder the mind works with the body to continue gaining control by trusting theory. If my body is moving this way and the attacker is going that way…what am I doing to guarantee that we won’t be in two places at the same time?

Lou has trained herself to stop second guessing.

Whoa…imagine a world when second guessing becomes the mood ring you no longer wear, the toe socks trashed because those things at the end of your feet weren’t meant to be separated and the Commodore 64 video game that tore up your passion to stop playing board games like Monopoly.

Focus outward…

Radio commercials aren’t meant to convince your fingers to jolt into the mode of button pushing but rather each 15 to 60 seconds of collected thoughts are designed to help make your life better than what it was ten minutes ago.

Its human nature to feel a need to better every twenty four hour period handed out at sunrise. Business owners open their doors to help make everything you want easier to achieve. When I write and produce commercials my focus outward is fed by a passion to connect dots. You want…they have.

Lou writes, “Passion is honest. Passion is never about melodramatic cheerleading.”

Seriously, because of the recession, the downsizing of American workforces, the lack of respect from your children and Mother in law, the cost of gasoline and boring cable TV, where does your personal passion take its place in the halls of your on going never talk about it fame.

What are you doing to focus outward while walking through the chapters of a book that have so much going on that life has become nothing more than one you in two or twenty places at the same time?

I don’t paint any more. The thought of writing and publishing a seventh book is gone. My music rests in a computer in a real recording studio because those professionally mixing it down have no clue how important it is to me for it to be ready for my Mother to hear it because they’re in twelve to forty different places at the same time.

Martin Luther King Jr. isn’t the only one to have a dream. I had a dream too… I had a dream about people, a once strong nation of believers and doers. It was a dream about life; a dream about how we lived and how we wanted to still live. I dreamed of change. An impossible dream I’ve been told my entire life. I dreamed until I could dream no more only to wake up in a cold sweat fearing like I have my entire life. Because in this dream we fell as a nation and nobody cared to pick us back up. We were too busy being in two places at the same time.

arroecollins@clearchannel.com

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