Let’s just say that my career as a car mechanic is on life support. 🙃
I’m ready to hang it up today.
They’re just so many other things that I want to do, and time just marches on so quickly. I turn 42 in 2 weeks.
And I’ll be on a plane still with a little bit of the thought left as I usher in the day. 🙃 It’ll be the second year in a row that I won’t be home for Christmas.
42…
Good gravy, how time flies. I was 21 years old when I came home from my mission. I’ve almost been alive double that. I never ever ever pictured myself living the life that I live right now. But… That’s a subject I need to leave immediately, as staying on that one is likely going to bring with it significantly heavy thoughts and feelings and will likely drag me down lightning quickly.
So… I wasn’t planning on going there anyway, so it’s no harm to leave as soon as possible. 😅
Moving on!
Right now, the few things that are keeping me fixing cars are things like wanting to make sure that I have an income to be able to secure a loan for a house or property.
Trying to get a loan with no income is a little bit… unrealistic.
And It would also be nice to have some form of income coming in, so I’m not just eating into my reserves.
Anyway… I repeat myself a lot in this little journal blog thingy. Please forgive the regular repetition.
My heart is far away from cars. And money, though still a concern, is so much less of a concern than it was even a few months ago.
What my heart longs for most is to go out and be with people and to help people in person. I love to see the gratitude in people’s faces and hearts when they receive service. I love even more to see the light in people’s eyes when they see that you truly do care about them. That’s what I long for in my life. I want to see that every day. I want to go out and help and serve and lift and love.
The problem is a lot of the things that I Phil will be of greatest benefit require a lot of alone time. I have some books I want to write, books I feel could be really valuable for people.
But there’s also a battle within me.
Though at times I feel as though I have powerful things to share that could be of great benefit to other people, at other times, I see how little I know, and I wonder if I really have that much to share.
And having tried and failed in the past to write books that I was happy with, there’s more than a little bit of apprehension, anxiety, and maybe even little bit of mild PTSD with a thought of trying again to write a book.
I have no trouble trouble having the non-fiction ideas flow out of me because I see the stories in my mind as though they were movies, and I just write what I see.
But the things that I want to write about… are not fiction. There’s no movie. There are a mountain of concepts that I’m trying to organize together in a coherent whole.
And if that weren’t challenging enough, I’m learning constantly even as I’m writing, so everything that I’m writing is changing, I know, or expect that probably before I even finished publishing the book, they’re going to be things that I want to go back and change, or remove, or add.
How do you write a book about something that you’re still learning about? I feel like I have a lot to offer because when I talk about it with other people, it seems to be valuable and beneficial, but I myself am still learning and growing and evolving.
And I likely will be till the day I die.
How do you decide when the knowledge you have is enough to share in something that is as permanent as publication? I know you can go back and have multiple editions, and maybe that’s What I do?
And the anxiety, feeling the weight of the task ahead of me, knowing the monumental challenge that it is for me, I can feel the avoidance kick in… I can feel the desire to run away and immerse myself in the consumption of media, like YouTube videos about the progress of electric cars and whatnot… Things I can do to try and avoid and forget.
It’s like that old saying, I don’t want to learn a language, but I want to have learned a language. I don’t want to write the books, but I want to have written the books.
I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do all this…
But it’s time. It’s time to move on. Time to leave the cars. Time to do what I’ve been talking about doing for so long. The only question is: what’s the next right step? I don’t have the whole picture before me.
Love to all. 😊
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 