Life makes you go through it to get to it. This is one of my favorite sayings that I tell myself every day. And I share it with other prisoners hoping they realize how important it is to go through something to get to something.
I’ve always believed that the best teachers are the ones who have gone through the worst circumstances. No matter how brutal or how vicious it may have been, if a person has survived something, they are the best teachers to teach how not to go through it again. Or they are the ones who can teach someone how to get through it.
Doing all this time in prison has been a rough journey for me. But when I meet the new intakes, many of them couldn’t guess how long I’ve been incarcerated. One reason for this is due to the fact that I’ve done my best to keep my mindset on positive things.
Before I learned about the health benefits of having a positive mental attitude, I practiced it. I used to tell myself not to let anything get me down. I didn’t know I was hypnotizing myself to keep a mind frame that would help me survive decades later.
But it’s real. I have had to fight gang wars, endure abuse by prison guards, spend years in solitary confinement, and wondered daily if I would ever go home. Yet, I endured it all through a positive mental attitude. From exercising to keeping my mind educated, I worked on myself as often as I could to create an example for people who wanted to find a way to stay sane and didn’t know how.
Nowadays I spend my time encouraging others to make the best use of their life. To do the things that make them feel better and do better. I talk to the young men who get locked up and I answer their questions about survival, how to survive prison with some sense of integrity. Most people give up on the young men who may not listen, but I don’t. I have a belief, and it goes like this: it’s my job to say it; and it’s their job to listen. As long as I do my job, I am satisfied that I pushed the right energy out there. I do hope they take heed and one day discover for themselves all the beauty life can give so they don’ t rot in an ugly place like prison. But they each must rely on their own ears and their own comprehension to truly benefit from my words.
Life gives us things. We can consider them test or we can take things as failure and never get back up. I’ve learned it’s our choice. In Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy informs us that, “[It] is not what happens to [us] but the way that [we] interpret the things that are happening to [us] that determines how [we] feel” (p.85). Despite whatever we are going through it’s up to us to make every moment count.
I could have come into prison and fell victim to things I wouldn’t be able to survive, but I chose to look at things differently. It’s not that I didn’t have a hard time, or that I wasn’t involved in many bad things, I just looked at it differently. When I came to prison, I was sixteen. I was still learning the meaning of life. Imagine having to graft that reason from the conditions behind bars. It could have been easy for me to make the worst of myself and never return to normal form. But I kept that positive mental attitude in mind before I even knew that phrase, and I was able to survive thus far.
My journey is not over yet. I still have much to learn, even at forty-one years old. By no means have I learned the best part of life. But what I have managed to do was to take the worst part of my life and draw some good from it. Now my only goal is to push positive energy your way. To push positive energy in the direction of other people so they can get through their tough times.
One other thing I had to learn to really get to this point was I had to make peace with myself. In prison it’s easy to be a Debbie-downer and gripe about everything that goes wrong in your life. I could cry about my time. Or the fact I’ve been in prison since I was a kid. Or I can call it quits and take myself out and not face reality anymore. These are just the facts. But, I believe, there is something more to achieve than just life in a prison cell. It may be writing this article and pushing good energy into the atmosphere. Who know? But I believe I must do it.
I have no desire to feed my lower nature, that bad wolf which turns on us in the end and creates a life filled with hell. That’s all perception. The pain I feel and the mental anguish that creeps up from time to time, I observe it now. I look inside my mind at it, and I decide whether I want to feel that emotion at that time. Many times, I choose not to feel a certain emotion and I don’t. It’s an art within taking over one’s own mind and making the best out of the thoughts we think. We all can do it.
Developing a positive mental attitude changed my life. And it can change your too. As one of my favorite teachers, Napoleon Hill, taught me long ago, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”
I encourage you, whoever you are and wherever you are, to take the time out of your day to plan to develop a positive mental attitude. It will cost you nothing but a little bit of time for a lifetime of measured joy and peace. It doesn’t mean we will not go through things. What it does mean is we’ll be able to respond to it differently than we’ve responded to trying times in the past. In any event, take care, and I hope the best for us all. Peace and Good Will.
Works Cited: Tracy, Brian. Eat That Frog. San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler, 2007.
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