The Man In The Glass
When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day,
Just go to a mirror and look at yourself,
For it isn’t your father or mother or wife,
Who judgment upon you must pass;
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one starring back from the glass.
He’s the fellow to please, never mind all the rest.
For he’s with you clear up to the end,
And you’ve passed the most dangerous, difficult test
If the man in the glass is your friend.
You may be like Jack Horner and “chisel” a plum,
And think you’re a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.
You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years.
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be the heartaches and tears
If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.
– Dale Wimbrow
I look at myself in the mirror every day. I no longer see the same face I used to look at. The face that was struggling to make it happen.
I see a face that smiles on its own. That is me. This song really struck me hard because I used to go through this exact same dance with the mirror every single day.
I have suggested in the past that looking in the mirror is one of the best things you can do. It doesn’t lie to you.
You are what is right in front of you. Nothing more and nothing less. That moment when you look up and look directly into your eyes is the most honest moment of your life. We all have things that we need to sort out.
That is life. But don’t fool yourself.
There are always things that you need to work on.
Just because you are smiling in that mirror doesn’t mean you can’t use that natural high to create more opportunities.
I stayed up till 5am last night.
I have always wanted to have a Twitter and a Facebook page for my writing, but I had always put it off.
So after a few hours of working for my job, I spent the next couple of hours cranking away at creating. And now, I have created something that makes me happy and I have achieved a goal.
It’s amazing how much of your own way you can get in when you make up reasons for not doing things. While I am still injured and my knee is at about 60%, I have been crutching to the gym almost every day and working out the rest of my body.
While the journey there is difficult and my arms are burning, I know that it is the best thing for me. I can’t wait till I am back to 100%.
Back to Crossfit…back to competing for everything that was in my dreams this year. But as of right now, what can I do?
I can follow through every day with making my goals happen and creating new ones on a daily basis.
This is something I wrote in May about the man in the mirror
Look at yourself in the mirror once in a while. Can you sit there and just look at yourself?
You will come to find that if there is something burning in your conscious, then you will turn away from that mirror pretty fast.
I do this every day. It has nothing to do with arrogance, cockiness, or anything of that matter, but rather a check to see if I did everything that day that I stand for and try to live up to.
I stare myself down in the mirror and ask myself if I gave my best… if I am learning how to become the man I want to be.
This morning I was looking through my phone and I came across a note that I wrote that my grandmothers best friend told me.
My grandmother had terrible Alzheimer’s and it claimed her life eventually. I remember visiting her when I was little, and she wouldn’t know who anyone was, even family.
Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease, because it makes the people you care about a shell of what you remember them to be.
There is no turning back. But what my grandmother’s best friend told me was this.
She sat me down and talked to me about my relationships and the people I had seen or was seeing, and she said…
Evan, your grandmother and your grandfather loved each other very much. Your grandfather had to go out west and your grandmother decided to stay in the east and thought that this was the end for them. She thought that it would be fine and she would find another person eventually. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be without him. So, she moved everything she had out west, started a family, and lived a very happy life. And you know what she told me when I asked her why she did it? Evan she said ‘You know its great when you can’t live without the other person.’
I have often thought about love and what love really is.
After what happened in February, I definitely gave this a lot of thought. But I did myself a favor. Something I realized about myself was that I get into one relationship after the next.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like the person that I was with, but it was to deaden the pain a little bit. There’s really nothing that wrong with that, it wasn’t malicious behavior or anything, but it was a bit of a crutch.
So, one thing that I set out to do was to make sure that I was 100% okay before I started anything again. Well, that was one of the smartest decisions that I had ever made. And because of that, great things came from that good decision.
While sometimes we are faced with hard decisions, we always know what the right decision is.
The right decision may be the one that very hard and has a unclear path for its outcome, but in the heart you know that it is the right one to make. No matter what the situation is, things will work themselves out.
You cannot be scared of getting into something because of a complication.
Let your heart guide you through everything.
The most light you will ever see is the light that comes when you just get out of the darkness.
I look back onto most of my writing over the past few months, and I see the little light that was flickering inside of me.
What is amazing is that I see all of the things that the Forum sought to teach me, just in a very unorganized fashion. I learned so much throughout my entire life, but it was just one big jumbled mess.
Now that I have the context and the distinctions to actually put what I believed in at my core, I can do anything.
Really. I can do anything.
It was scary to start my blog promotion online because I was nervous of what other people would think of it. But I took that first step and really went after something that I wanted.
So my goal for this month is to make a task list of 10 things that I have to do every single day, post it up on here, and also complete that list by the end of the day. There is no better time in life than right now.
I struggled in school over the past few years for many different reasons. But I look at this final year in front of me with passion and fearlessness.
I know that I am going to do great things this year and absolutely knock one out of the park.
Yes, there will be challenges, but I know how to face them and will be ruthless in my journey towards achieving my goal.
I always had reasons for not doing well. This happened or this happened. I must always remember this one quote.
We either have the results or the reasons why not
This is simply truth. Humans are very “reasonable.” We make reasons for everything. The reason I didn’t do this was _________.
I am sure you can fill in the space there. No more reasons for things. I think this is why I crutch myself to the gym every day.
Is because I am fighting my ability to reason. Yes I get sore and my knee gets a little swollen at times, but damnit I want something and I want it bad! I will not lay there in submission and not doing anything with my life because I have a reason not to.
This is partly why I am also writing at 5am. I just happened to wake up at this time and felt the need to get my day going.
Something else that has been on my mind was creating a bucket list for this year of things that I wanted to do.
I know that creating long lists of things is really difficult because they never get done, but I think that having this list would be a great addition to my life.
I have never been so excited about life. Ever. And the thing is, that high on life feeling that I had when I came out of the Forum never really went away.
Its been a full month now, and I know that if I keep implementing the things I learned every single day, that I will continue to make strides.
And that is all you can ask for. Making strides.
So, that is what I am going to continue to do in every area of my life.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project