So undeserving

One of my favorite things to do is to watch inspiring stories of amazing individuals on Ellen. One day while browsing through there was a segment about a young lady that would be receiving money. In the interview Ellen mentioned that the young lady had to give up cable to be able to feed her children, this stopped me in my tracks.

I was mad, frustrated and upset. How could giving up your cable be considered like such a big deal. I live with cable and I am able to survive. There are plenty of people out there that live with so much less and in my opinion are so much more deserving. Then it hit me like a bag of bricks, very rarely do we ever get what we truly deserve and more importantly the idea that we have the right to judge the worthiness of anyone is wrong.

There will always be someone who wants it more, deserves it more and has suffered more. Yet for some reason that cannot be explained we get so much more than we deserve. I for one can say with absolute certainty that if I was given everything that I deserve, I would not be where I am today.
Far too often in my own life, I have held back kindness, words of encouragement or praise for someone because I did not believe they deserved it. I did not believe that they had done enough to earn what I could give them and what could potentially change their life and the true misery of it all is I lost far more when I did not share than I would have lost or potentially lost with sharing it, all because I did not think they were deserving.

The problem I faced and still face at times is the belief that I have the right and the need to base my actions on how deserving an individual is. I understand the fact that we need to choose who we spend our time with and make sure we spend our time with those that bring us up. This is a different concept. It is not about whom you spend your time with; it is about a simple action to choose kindness and to choose to give the best version of yourself every single second of your life.
In life we always have two options, to give the best version of ourselves or to settle for something less. When we settle, we do more of a disservice to ourselves than to anyone else. When we choose to not give the best version of ourselves we not only impact our current situation in a negative way but our future as well. Every decision we make brings us closer or further away to our goals and to becoming an even better version of ourselves.

It is the people that have chosen to constantly give the best version of themselves with blatant disregard to what was happening around them that stick out in our mind. Think of Anne Frank, and everything that she dealt with in her lifetime. Martin Luther King who lived in a time where it would have been easy to embrace violence, decided to give the best version of himself and inspire a nation. In my own life I think of two individuals who keep me going every single day and have inspired me beyond words, while I have many of these people in my life, this mother and son stick out. Their names are Annika and Bo Johnson.

Bo was diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia at the age of 12 and sadly his life ended far too soon on September 28, 2012. While the news is devastating I do not think I am doing him proper justice by just focusing on the battle he had to endure, the real story of inspiration is the life he lived inspire of it all. Bo’s message is simple, Love each other, help each other, have your neighbor's back. If you see someone in need- even a stranger- reaches out and helps. This world can be a better place if we care and help each other. When he was sent home to spend his last remaining days with his family and friends, he did not focus on being negative because of the situation he was in but instead he decided to give the best version of himself and to change the world and the lives of the people around him. Then you have Annika, the mother of Bo, a women who had the most important and precious thing in her life taken away from her. To most this would be the start to living the rest of your life full of hate and seeing all the evil in the world. This is not Annika; she gives the best version of herself and continues to change the world around her. She cheers on every patient battling cancer with the hope that no one will ever have to go through losing someone they love like she did. I imagine a world where they both made the decision to simply not give the best version of themselves, it certainly would have been understandable, they certainly would have been deserving to do so but they decided not to, and instead of hiding from the world, they went out and changed it.

There are two messages I want you to get from this post. The first I hope is clear, stop judging people, yourself and your actions based on what is “deserved” and simply give the best version of yourself. The second is that I want you to realize that the only way you can change the world is by giving the best version of yourself. You do not need some giant plan, you just need to be yourself.