Merry Christmas from the Conquest

How To Ruin Your Life (Without Even Noticing That You Are)

Bianca Sparacino

Understand that life is not a straight line. Life is not a set timeline of milestones. It is okay if you don’t finish school, get married, find a job that supports you, have a family, make money, and live comfortably all by this age, or that age. It’s okay if you do, as long as you understand that if you’re not married by 25, or a Vice President by 30 — or even happy, for that matter — the world isn’t going to condemn you. You are allowed to backtrack. You are allowed to figure out what inspires you. You are allowed time, and I think we often forget that. We choose a program right out of high school because the proper thing to do is to go straight to University. We choose a job right out of University, even if we didn’t love our program, because we just invested time into it. We go to that job every morning because we feel the need to support ourselves abundantly. We take the next step, and the next step, and the next step, thinking that we are fulfilling some checklist for life, and one day we wake up depressed. We wake up stressed out. We feel pressured and don’t know why. That is how you ruin your life.

You ruin your life by choosing the wrong person. What is it with our need to fast-track relationships? Why are we so enamored with the idea of first becoming somebody’s rather than somebodies? Trust me when I say that a love bred out of convenience, a love that blossoms from the need to sleep beside someone, a love that caters to our need for attention rather than passion, is a love that will not inspire you at 6am when you roll over and embrace it. Strive to discover foundational love, the kind of relationship that motivates you to be a better man or woman, the kind of intimacy that is rare rather than right there. “But I don’t want to be alone,” we often exclaim. Be alone. Eat alone, take yourself on dates, sleep alone. In the midst of this you will learn about yourself. You will grow, you will figure out what inspires you, you will curate your own dreams, your own beliefs, your own stunning clarity, and when you do meet the person who makes your cells dance, you will be sure of it, because you are sure of yourself. Wait for it. Please, I urge you to wait for it, to fight for it, to make an effort for it if you have already found it, because it is the most beautiful thing your heart will experience.

You ruin your life by letting your past govern it. It is common for certain things in life to happen to you. There will be heartbreak, confusion, days where you feel like you aren’t special or purposeful. There are moments that will stay with you, words that will stick. You cannot let these define you – they were simply moments, they were simply words. If you allow for every negative event in your life to outline how you view yourself, you will view the world around you negatively. You will miss out on opportunities because you didn’t get that promotion five years ago, convincing yourself that you were stupid. You will miss out on affection because you assumed your past love left you because you weren’t good enough, and now you don’t believe the man or the woman who urges you to believe you are. This is a cyclic, self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t allow yourself to move past what happened, what was said, what was felt, you will look at your future with that lens, and nothing will be able to breach that judgment. You will keep on justifying, reliving, and fueling a perception that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

You ruin your life when you compare yourself to others. The amount of Instagram followers you have does not decrease or increase your value. The amount of money in your bank account will not influence your compassion, your intelligence, or your happiness. The person who has two times more possessions than you does not have double the bliss, or double the merit. We get caught up in what our friends are liking, who our significant others are following, and at the end of the day this not only ruins our lives, but it also ruins us. It creates within us this need to feel important, and in many cases we often put others down to achieve that.

You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how, you love. There is courage in that. 

You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you innately desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside of you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. The next Michelangelo could be sitting behind a Macbook right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life.

Rio de Janeiro

One of my favourite shots from

Brazil.

Back from Brazil

So I am back from Brazil and I have tons of stories and photos to share. It'll take me some time to compile it all as I am also getting ready (slowly) to go back out to sea in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, wanted to share this amazing DJ. I heard him in Itacare when I was hanging out at this laid back restaurant. Brought me back to my electronic days and made me regret that I stopped DJ-ing.

http://www.djtrusty.com

Enjoy!

N

Making my dreams come true one at a time....

Support my friends and I when we do the Terry Fox Run!

This year I am proudly supporting The Terry Fox Foundation in its ongoing work to fund innovative and progressive cancer research programs. I very much hope you will consider making a donation in support of my effort, confident in the knowledge that your kindness will impact the lives of so many people living with cancer.

You can help support me by making a secure online donation using your credit card, or through Paypal. Please click on the link below:

https://secure.e2rm.com/registrant/FundraisingPage.aspx?registrationID=2552322&langPref=en-CA

For more information on how you can participate in The Terry Fox Run , or for more information about The Terry Fox Foundation, please visit www.terryfox.org.

Thanks for your suppor

Latest gym progress

Catching up

I know I haven't been very good at posting lately. In my defense, when you work 65 hours a week, you're on call 24/7 and have crappy satellite internet, blogging is sheer torture. Then trying to blog off my iphone in american ports of call when i have like 1 hour to use it, also not ideal lol.

I am home now after 7 months at sea. I am tired and slowly trying to get back to a land routine. I am having difficulties sleeping but that's expected cause well, my house isn't rocking me back and forth to sleep. Also takes my stomach some time to get used to the food here. Crazy what havoc clean and fresh food can wreak on your stomach.

This contract was an easier one but always my work remains challenging. BUT this time my ship didn't catch on fire and no one died on my watch which makes me a lot more mentally stable this vacation.  I focused a lot of my personal growth both in physical fitness and mental fitness. I was fortunate to meet all these enlightened people (I call them my Vision Board People) who share  similar outlook on life as me.  It was great to be around people that think positively and believe in the law of attraction (http://www.thesecret.tv/ ) and who believe in their own power.  I fix conflicts and problems and listen to people complain all day (and there are 1200 of them), so having a physical and mental outlet is very important (and quite essential) for me to stay sane.  I also started posting lots of motivation and inspirational stuff on my insta page ( http://instagram.com/natalllya79 ). I love being surrounded by all this positive energy.

Anyways, what I am trying to say is that I had a good contract and I am happy to be home. I have 3 months off an I have some wicked travel ideas.  I'll be putting up some pics soon of my last 7 months at sea.

Ciao Ciao,
Nats


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And if you've ever worked on a ship....

Then you have already done this!

The hardest part of travelling

Amazing article that just nails it. I am not in any one country longer then a few days. I come home to Canada once, maybe twice  a year. This article just says it all.

http://thoughtcatalog.com/kellie-donnelly/2014/07/the-hardest-part-about-traveling-no-one-talks-about/