You decide what's right you decide what's good

People make mistakes, Holding to their own, Thinking they're alone. Honor their mistakes; Everybody makes; Fight for their mistakes; One another's terrible mistakes. Witches can be right, Giants can be good. You decide what's right you decide what's good. ~ No One Is Alone, Into the Woods

Into the Woods is one of my favorite musicals of all time. It’s one of those musicals that I quote and actually have the original cast recording in my car so I can listen to it as I’m driving to work. I love all the songs to this musical, but as I have gotten older and rediscovering some of the deeper meaning to the lyrics, I have really fallen in love with the song “No One Is Alone.”

The entire song is brilliant with the idea that you have to make your own decisions and that there is a certain point you need to proceed on your own, but that you will never completely be alone. My favorite part of the song though is:

People make mistakes, Holding to their own, Thinking they're alone. Honor their mistakes; Everybody makes; Fight for their mistakes; One another's terrible mistakes. Witches can be right, Giants can be good. You decide what's right you decide what's good.

The part of this that I want to focus on is “Witches can be right, Giants can be good. You decide what’s right you decide what’s good.”

Too often we make rash decisions and categorize people as a good guy or a bad guy based on irrational things. It’s easier for us to say that all “witches” are bad, but we don’t know their intentions nor do we know them.

That’s why I love the musical, because you get to see everyone’s intentions and motives and everything is gray.


The beauty of this song is saying that we are all different and things will be complicated, but we are not alone. There are others on our side, but need to be aware that we cannot just judge and say that one side is better than the other, since it is more complicated than that. It’s such a great for children and adults alike, since we always need reminded of this lesson.

Change the world by starting with yourself

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ~ Rumi

Change, in my humble opinion, is one of the most controversial words a person can say. Change is a word that so many people will fight against, because it insights new patterns and shifts perceptions. Even with the constant push back on it, change will always happen.

There will be some natural progression of change and then some man-made movements of change. I personally enjoy following up with the man-made movements of change, because I like learning about the human-condition and why people do the things they do and feel passionate about certain topics.

Anyway, people are determined to change the world because they see injustice in the world. This is a perfectly understandable reason on demanding change in the world, because we should fight against injustice.

But with this idea of changing the world, are we choosing the change ourselves?

The wise thing to do is to change ourselves before we even take the endeavor of changing our surroundings. Before going too much farther I want to distinguish the fact that we as humans will never reach the perfect level of self-awareness. What I am meaning is constantly evaluating our motives and our thoughts.

What I used to do every couple of months is to take time to self-evaluate myself. I would take a personal inventory of myself and determine whether I was where I wanted to be. This evaluation helps me grow in deep ways. When you start writing out things or listing things about your life, it is amazing how deep you can get. You start realizing where your priorities are and personally, it inspires me to change parts of myself. Once making these personal changes, this new mentality starts to overflow in other aspects of my life. It’s absolutely wonderful and refreshing. The process can be painful if done correctly, because you have to call yourself out on the crap that you are doing. It is being accountable to yourself and the inner change and lead to an enlightened mindset.

So if you want to help change the world, start with yourself and it be easier to help bring change to the world.

Normalizing Panic

I want to apologize for the lack of writing I have done the last number of months. There are still series I want to write and different topics I want to cover, but it has been hard to balance work, grad school, and my social life on top of writing this blog. I am going to try to post certain posts, like Quote Mondays more and will occasionally do a Business Wednesday and/or Random Friday. But let's move on to the actual post.

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” ~ Anaïs Nin

 Since June, my life seems like it has been in a constant blur. There have been so many changes in my life, all which are good, but have had no real time to process these immediate changes. This has thus led me down a destructive road of bottling up my emotions and thus causing panic attacks. If you recall, I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago about my very first panic attack. Since then, I have experienced them more frequently and it is no fun. I'm actually pretty good at picking up on the signs of the beginning stages of this attack. Typically I do not go into full-blown attacks, but every once in a while, I'm unable to prevent it. 

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” ~ Anaïs Nin

I'm not sure if you (whoever is reading this) have experienced a panic attack, but you literally feeling like you are dying. The description that Anaïs Nin gives is a perfect description of what it feels like. It feels like you are being dragged down and have no hope of being able to pull yourself out of it.

Now this is typically the part of the post where I give some type of positive message of how I’m combating this or some self-awareness moment, but not this time. I just think we need to speak more about the fact that people have these types of anxiety.

For example, I have had full on conversations with friends about how normal having these types of attacks are. We have different personality traits and how we react to situations, yet we all have these panic attacks and believe they are a part of life. This is kind of messed up since we are in are early-mid 20s and believe panic attacks are just part of life.

I believe we think this is normal since we have now put extreme pressure on kids at such an early age. Test scores, being the successful athlete, talking about how you need to be in a certain amount of extracurricular so you can get scholarships and be able to get into a good school to then be able to get into a good Master program and so on. This is the crap and pressure that is being fed at such an early age and it is ridiculous.

Pressure is not bad, but the high level is just insane since it takes passion out of people. It kills the love that people can have for learning or the arts or sports or life in general.

Anxiety is the greatest killer of love and passion since it completely drains a person and will sooner or later make them numb.


So maybe there is a lesson in this. If you realize that you are experiencing this amount of panic and anxiety, then you need to step back so you don’t lose you passion and love of life.