I know there is a lot of this in prison. I myself am not a magic thinker although I do believe in magic 🙂 Magic thinking to me is to think when you walk out of prison everything will be just wonderful. I am not under any illusion that there is anything like a magic gate to walk through upon leaving prison. However, my life will be different than it ever has been. I am not the same person I was a year ago, not mentally, not physically. The change in me was not a quick change. Though now change comes more quickly. I think I am growing in leaps and bounds. I see it in myself each day. I credit much of my progress to the development of new habits. In everything I do, habit plays a vital roll. It has become what I call the snow ball effect as the habits get bigger and bigger and harder to stop each day.

I didn’t just start reading the books I now read daily, because they are such thrillers or even good entertainment. I read them, because I do not want to come back and die here in a prison cell. Although now I have learned to enjoy the feeling that comes from confidence they give, I myself have gained from reading the things I read. I have learned to believe in my own thinking. For the first time in my life I know I am on the right road.

Looking back at the success stories that I have read of prisoners getting out and becoming a success, I now realize that it was not just some lucky break they got. It was not that they stumbled upon an Aladdin’s lamp. They put forth the effort necessary to develop a manner of living that requires rigorous Honesty, Open-mindedness and Willingness. That is the HOW and the why of their success.

I am still learning every day. Sure I still fall short at times but I claim progress rather than perfection. I can look around me and honestly say I am better than I ever have been. My feeling of worthiness does not come from things, it comes to me from the feelings in my heart. When I take a moral inventory of myself, when I hear those words from Friends in the free world “thanks for your words of encouragement” or simply that I have a hint, a bit of wisdom in something I wrote now and then.

Sure, it seems like magic thinking, yet you cannot see the hours I pour into what I read and think. How much of myself I pour into the pages I write or the persona which flows from this stream of consciousness. I am always changed by what I read, as well as what I write, words have the magic ability to somehow, someway in passing through your mind leave something behind and take something with them, like water flowing down a stream bed softly, gently, nudging, rolling, tumbling, wearing away stone, ever widening, deepening, changing as it flows.

Should I never come back to prison it will be because I have adjusted the set of my sails, not the Gale, that determines the way I go.

Peace & Light
Aubrey