Unknown

11:00 Sunday night...I can't sleep.  I have the headphones on, the Pandora station "Fink" playing and my mind is racing with ideas.  I once heard that Sunday nights are the hardest nights for people to go to sleep, being one who doesn't just like to hear things, but always wants to know for sure...I did a little research and apparently it is true.  Sunday night is the worst night on average for human beings to get a regular night's sleep.  Sunday night sleeping not being the point of my blog I won't bore you with the statistics, but if you're interested go to Google and type in "Sunday Night Sleep Problems" and you'll find all the studies you want to read. 

Why can't I go to sleep?  That is what my blog is about and the title Unknown plays into this, Disclaimer:  because of the things I am dealing with most of this blog is going to be talked about in "metaphor" or "point of view", but hopefully you will be able to make some kind of sense out of it when I am done.  If not maybe I will put both of us to sleep.  Either way I see it as a win/win. 

In life I feel that we spend a large part of it trying to figure out what we are supposed to do, what is our "calling" exactly.  Dependent upon your religious views you can say God is leading me to do this, or I feel that by doing this it will bring good Karma.  I try not to cover religious topics in these blogs because that's between you and your creator, but I do think it is safe to say we all question, "what is my purpose?"  I've questioned mine since I was a child.  I have a book from elementary school that lists what I wanted to do when I "grew" up...on one line it says "gold digger" (not Kanye West kind, but actually pick and shovel).  The very next line says "mayor".  Funny I look back at those two ideas and can completely explain why they were my choices, one gave me the chance to be outdoors and possibly find instant riches, the other seemed to give me power, power to make decisions and control people.  All things that little boys dream of, or at least I did. 

28 years later, a college degree and 6 years spent in the business world and I still spend my time thinking "what do I want to do when I grow up".  I know many of you are smiling saying, "aren't you grown up at 28?"  I vote no, ha.  Here is where I am going.  I have an idea of what I want to do, I have a passion for what I think I should be doing, but getting from point A to point B is not as simple as walking across the street.  It's not like when I was young and you were told, work hard, go to school, make good grades, go to a good college, and you will be successful.  Instead I look at what I want to do, I look at who I want to work with and I see a wall of road blocks.  Not bad, not good, just obstacles...better put, reality slaps you in the face and says the world isn't that easy.  I teach people I work with, patience, take the time, put in the effort and the rewards will pay off, but putting that into practice is about as hard as running a marathon with half training.  You might do it and finish, or you might start and get carried off in an ambulance.

Knowing these challenges as we get older causes stress, both good and bad.  I've written in earlier posts about stresses I have faced in my life and the obstacles I am still trying to overcome.  I guess I write tonight because I face stress.  Stress that keeps me from sleeping, not because of what might come tomorrow, or whether or not the week will go well, but because I see the crossroads in a sector of people's lives and I don't have the power to control the track their train will take.  Back to religion real quick, a strong Christian would say "Let go and let God",  I should say that, I know this, but I look at our society today, a society I live in and have honestly helped create and it scares me.  I see some chances for our country to grow in a slow and steady progression, but I also see chances where we leave key people behind and those left behind will affect our future.  I see obstacles that can be faced, and I see obstacles that can be buried in so much red tape and bureaucracy that by the time the issue is addressed the problem has accelerated from a snowball to an avalanche.  Snowballs hurt and can be rather annoying, avalanches wipe out society.  Now this is not to sound doom and gloom, that is not my intention at all, but when we look at the stresses that cause us not to sleep on a Sunday night, the worst night of sleep for most people, what are the stresses keeping us awake?

Martin Luther King Jr. one of many men that I have studied and admired because of his willingness to be a voice for those who did not have one, fought a valiant public fight.  If you do research and study him though you know he struggled with the same demons we all do as humans...infidelity, doubt, stress, addiction, loneliness etc.  I can only imagine that he spent many a Sunday nights laying awake wondering what the future would hold.  In fact right now as the "Occupy" movement goes on (which I am not going to cover ) it reminds me of King's last days.  If you study, he was shot in Memphis while there to bring a voice to the movement of sanitation workers and their unfair treatment of employment, but that was not his big "goal" at the time.  At that exact point and time, and the months leading up to it he had been planning a poor people's "march/occupation" of Washington D.C, on the Mall to be exact.  Many in his own circle thought he was crazy for taking this cause up.  He had much more to lose by becoming the face of a new campaign then he had to gain by sticking with the reputation he had garnered as a great Civil Rights leader.  What King realized and was trying to address before he died is the same situation people struggle with today, it's the same stress that keeps me up on sleepless Sunday nights.  We have an ever growing gap between the have's and the have nots and unfortunately I don't see the problem going away anytime soon.  This is not a problem we got into over night and is not a problem that will be fixed over night.

Here is my question?  My bullet point:  What are you/I doing to deal with a stress that is staring us in the face and looking back for an answer?  I am not going to give you a solution.  I am not going to give you a political or religious speech.  I am going to ask you to examine your mind, your heart and say "what are you gonna do"?  You come up with something that is right for you as an individual.  For all of us it is probably something different or unique, but until you ask the question, until you identify the root of the stress you can't come to grips with how to get a grasp on it, and the one thing I have learned in my very short 28 years, stress can not be run from.  It will eat away at you until diagnosed and dealt with and this is a stress our country faces as a whole.

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