Very recently, my sister was trying to teach my 6 year old niece a life lesson about thinking for one’s self. My niece was copying a behavior of some of her friends that my sister did not think was appropriate for a 6 year old girl. After a wily exchange, my sister finally asked my niece, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do the same?”
To which my niece replied, “Well… is there water under the bridge?”
Read MoreGoing through old boxes, random pieces of a life once lived now stacked away in a dark dry part of my basement. There it was, hidden in time and busy perpetual motion, in a box that came from my childhood home to college, then apartment to apartment to my married home, now divorced.
An unassuming orange hairbrush. The detangling agent of the wily beast that has always been my knotty long dark brown hair. But it was more... my weapon of choice.
I always felt responsible for my father dying. This is not sane or logical or fact-based. Have the coroner's report. Know it wasn't really my fault and yet my heart hangs heavy just thinking of him.
Read MoreEverything in moderation seems to be good advice for most things.
Eat in moderation, drink in moderation, work in moderation, sleep in moderation– dare it not be too much or too little. Dare you step out of the lines of life already drawn out for you. Moderation keeps people in a nice neat box. And because most people follow the rules, life and society exist in moderation.
Life continuously flows, day in and day out, sun up and sun down.
But nothing happens in moderation. Nothing. Inertia happens. It might keep life easy but nothing is changing or growing, it just rolls right along into the next day.
Read MoreTime is an odd thing conceptually for me. Conventional wisdom would tell you that we should live in the present but we must constantly evaluate our past to process our present to secure our future. Time in general has a different context for everyone, from physicist to philosophers and spiritual advisers.
There is one constant truth no matter what your belief is on the subject. Time is finite for a living being and we all strive to do something important with it that makes us feel valuable.
Read MoreWhen you grow up in a small town, everything is conveniently packed into one location, so travel time and destination are often irrelevant conversation pieces. Even at my young age, I knew these routine trips ended in one of two places, either the Dairy Queen where I was promised we were going, or the Laundromat where I knew we shouldn’t be going.
Most of the time, I didn’t get ice-cream. My grandfather would take a deep breathe, look over at me, and tell me he needed to stop in at the laundromat to see his friend, Buddy, for a minute.
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