Where is Your Life HEADED?

Where is Your Life Headed?
From Gangster Rap to Poetic Justice, to Ordinary Words...

I remember sitting in a subway car on my way home from grade nine. I had an 88% average and I was making good money at my job, yet I was depressed out of my mind. I wasn't in a rush to get home -- I would stay on the subway for hours, not really caring about the day, caring about who I was, or caring about where I was going. My eyes were closed, my head was leaning against the wall, and my walkman was playing lyrics of rappers such as The Ghetto Boys, 2 Live Crew, and NWA.

Where was my life headed? I didn't know at the time...

Life seemed cruel and unfair to me, so I sought refuge in an underground world of technology. I operated a BBS (the communication technology before the Internet popularized) where we traded pirated software, distributed articles on anarchy, and collected all sorts of computer viruses. I didn't want to write essays in high-school, so I even created a system to trade book reports and assignments with people around the world. And I justified it all with the hacker's manifesto:

"...We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals..."

Where was my life headed? I didn't know at the time...

I tried to change. I really tried. I'd talk to teachers, I'd write letters, I'd do anything to get my life on track. Writing poetry seemed to help a little bit. The days of listening to gangster rap paid off as I applied the lyrical creativity I heard to my own writings. What did I come up with? My motto by the end of high-school became "The whole system is [m]ucked, everybody knows it's [m]ucked, and nobody will do [m]uck about it."

Where was my life headed? I felt my world was messed up. But was the "whole world" messed up? I wanted to find out, so I traveled and I continued my interest in discovering the personal development phenomenon.

What did I discover? The world IS messed up! AND... the purpose of life is to improve our world and the world around us -- not to complain about it, but to do something about it.

Where is your life headed? It may seem like it's headed nowhere. It may seem really confusing. It may not make much sense. Here's the beauty: Wherever we are in life, whatever it is that we are doing, it is happening for a reason. Today is creating our destiny, whether we realize it or not.

If gangster rap can be transformed into "ordinary words with extraordinary power"... What can your life be transformed into?

(c) Copyright Ordinary Words Inc., 2000-2004. All rights reserved.