Blood On Your Hands

"Is that…b b blood?” The shocked shop assistant’s face drains of colour, as to her horror she realises your hands are dripping in blood.

Imagine popping up the road to grab a pint of milk. As you hand over your money, you’re alarmed to discover your hands are caked in blood. Searching desperately for a wound, you breathe a momentary sigh of relief as you realise the blood is not your own. 

What if you paid a hitman to take another’s life? Imagine if everywhere you went, blood flowed freely from your hands, seeping onto your precious gadgets, staining your Armani jeans and forming a conspicuous dark red river on the pavement before you. Could you look a passerby in the eye, knowing you had blood on your hands? Sometimes I catch a blur of red out of the corner of my eye.

In the UK capital London there is a room full of grown men and women; debating on whether to join a war on a country thousands of miles away. When decisions on life and death are being made, some of these so called adults will jeer and scold like badly behaved children. 

You have delegated your voice to these people: they are your proxy. Whether you voted them in, or simply chose to remain silent; you have allowed them to act on your behalf and by doing so: they have the power to kill in your name. What’s even more ironic is that you’re paying them to do this! They are your hitmen.

Bombs kill people: they are not engineered to differentiate bad guys from civilians. They end lives, destroy homes and civilisations. There’s so more to life than consumerism: choking our precious seas with plastic and oil; in exchange for another’s blood. Even aid comes at a price: nothing is free apart from love and humility. When there are no guns and money - there are no guns to shoot people nor money to fund arms.

If you’re not intelligent enough to question why on Earth your own country are meddling in other country’s affairs - you’re already part of the problem rather than the resolution. Wake up! You’re paying for it from your own pocket and people are killing in your name. And in all honesty how is that any different from killing in the name of the God you believe in?

Tip Of The Iceberg

Our country is under attack. However, we’re not under siege from a crazed fanatic who has claimed the lives of five innocent British people in Westminster. The enemy is closer to home than you can ever imagine and you know them.

Less than 24 hours after the incident, whilst a nation mourns its fallen, somewhere the next victim is being lined up. The attacker waits for the opportune moment, attaches a carefully crafted caption.. pulls back the trigger and click.. a post is shared.

A single photo begins to circulate online of a woman adorned in headscarf, clutching a phone at one of the Westminster attack scenes. Like a war cry, the onlookers, outraged at the caption, arrive in their troves and the inevitable comments commence: “shame on you - you insensitive bitch!”

As a society we spend our lives in constant judgement of one another. The internet and social media have become the colosseums of our generation. Some days I wonder if we’ve managed to progress since Medieval times – the only being we cry “witch” from the safety of our keypads.

However, it might surprise you to know that I don’t live in fear of an imminent terrorist attack. Be it bullets, bombs or words, I have accepted that while there are weapons in the world there are weapons to wound people. I believe that when your cards are dealt, your time is up. It’s out of our hands. But it’s not all doom and gloom - there are some things we are in complete control of!

We are in complete control of the way we see the world and how we treat the people living in it. We only see the tip of the iceberg - I am more intrigued about what I can’t see.

I have trained my eyes to see people as icebergs. Everybody is fighting their own battle.

It took just one person to start that snowball rolling that day – just one. Imagine if their caption said something nice, something kind, something liberating - something to unite rather than divide. Perhaps we should be careful about the context in which we use the word terrorist.

The truth is we are all dictators. We dictate how people read our pictures, through a series of choice hashtags, crafty camera angles and pretty scenery. Add your filter, remove all the blemishes that make us who and what we are – and away we go! In 196 countries and the 7 billon people in the world – we are all but one.

Maybe rather than focussing on when our time could be up, we should focus on how make the most of the time we have left. Maybe we should measure the life in our days, not the days of our lives. Maybe we shouldn’t measure our success by the number of likes, shares and comments but by the way we’ve treated those around us and what we’ve left behind.

After all – at very best we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Tip Of The Iceberg

Art Of Abundant Thinking

I want to share something with you that has changed my life.

Yes it’s a massive, sweeping and controversial statement to lure you in and compel you to read on, but I want to let you into a secret that has helped me transform my small, yet now meaningful and significant existence!

Last year, after a whole lifetime of being enslaved by them - I finally took control of my thoughts.

I have spent many years enduring an endless battle with my own mind. I have always been a frightful worrier: finding something to obsess over, some imminent disaster I am simply powerless to prevent. Sometimes it rears its ugly head as health or money worries, sometimes paranoia, sometimes it’s just waking up in bad mood for no apparent reason.

It might come as a surprise that someone such as I would struggle with their mental health. This being the same person who can stand up, sing and speak in front of crowds of people. The same person who can disappear off confidently to a foreign country alone with simply a backpack and map for company.

But I have been harbouring a shameful secret: I have been faking it all along.

However I digress: something shifted last year and I want to see if it might inspire other people take control of their lives.

There was a point last year I was struggling financially, after quitting my day job to focus on music and writing. I was struggling to secure regular work in the creative industries. The heart-stopping thought of stepping back into an office, or even worse - a call centre, would literally make my blood run cold (sorry to anyone who actually enjoys such work but I’d rather hang myself from the ceiling by a headset than wear one again).

The problem I had is that those negative thoughts were plaguing my mind - not allowing room for anything else. One day I was having a wobbly moment at my desk at home, when my eyes glanced over at my vision board which was pinned up - almost smiling back at me. I gazed longingly at some of the pictures of countries I wanted to visit, imagined setting up my home studio, travelling the world and being able to indulge my loved ones.

My mind began to wonder as I daydreamed strolling along sandy beaches, sipping back coffee, writing and decorating my new home. This was a lot more of an exciting prospect than contracting a terminal illness.

A couple of minutes later the postman arrived with a thank you letter and cheque from a happy client. Wow, lucky me!

As the months went on, when I found myself starting to obsess over negative things I would redirect my thoughts to obsessing over how I would get more creative work. In the months that followed several freelance jobs came in and I was able to book a backpacking trip across Eastern Europe.

So how does this thought reprogramming malarkey work I hear you ask? 

**Imagine that your thoughts are rainwater which fill a vat. The vat has two taps: one hot and one cold**

Hot tap = nice things, health, wealth, happiness and prosperity

Cold tap = fear, poverty, misery and subsequent end of world

When you realise the cold tap is running, go back and turn it off and turn the hot tap on. Imagine you only have a finite amount of water in the vat, why would you want to waste such a precious resource on self sabotage?

If you find yourself obsessing over something that isn’t happening RIGHT NOW, stop yourself immediately and start thinking about what you want and why you want it. Your subconscious is so powerful that it’s at work all the time, even when you’re asleep.

**Top Tips**

- There is more than enough for everyone to live a happy, healthy and fulfilled existence. We are just programmed to believe otherwise by an unfair society!

- Do not impose any limits on your ability to create anything you want. Time is only a barrier if you are holding a watch and keeping score

- Don’t EVER feel guilty for wanting to better yourself in any way: financially, creatively, mentally, physically…

- Remove anyone from your life who doesn’t want you to be happy or attempts to stop you from being successful. If they keep eating your energy stop feeding them!

- Give unconditionally what you can spare. If you have more, there’s more to go round for someone else

- Be grateful for what you do have. Someone else may be gazing longingly at the life you might hate sometimes