I just read the full story online of what happened to that British soldier. I had heard mentions of it yesterday, but wasn’t able to see the news until now. What sends a shuddering lump to the deepest part of my stomach is how utterly calm the two killers were…how they walked up and down the street covered in blood, almost boasting about what they had done. It’s as if the cost of a life is no longer the ultimate price that it used to be; now, it’s almost mundane.
The destruction of a human being—either in body or in soul—was something done in extreme circumstances. That respect for life—the sacredness of living, of taking away everything except that—seems to be all but gone. We tear one another down with the ease of a bloodstained handshake. And so there are so many of us walking around broken—not dead, but neither living, for all of the light that’s been stomped out of us.
When does it stop? When does life have meaning again?
If this is as far as we have come—if hurting or flat-out killing each other is the only way we can make a point—then we are nowhere near as ‘evolved’ as we think we are.
If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to meet it.
Wondering where all the idle time has gotten lost
vivid once-warm memories now turned to frost
escaped and denied no matter what the cost
children on the swings whose hearts were crossed
you my savior, unclouded my thoughts—i your regret, your woeful albatross.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Everything is a sin if you do it right.
The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.
“
| — |
Rocky Balboa, Rocky VI.
|
One thing I have come to discover recently is that I do not care for the taste of gossip in my mouth. Not “gossip”—maybe that’s not the right word—but the feeling of talking about people in that sort of way. It’s not productive, talking and talking and rehashing the same stories until you’re right back where you started. It doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s a waste of energy on so many different levels. I much prefer talking about ideas—concepts, hypotheses, philosophy—things that move your mind beyond the common place, where gossip and idle chatter live. I don’t know what it is; I just feel so much better after a conversation that has challenged me and made me think, rather than one that doesn’t.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
What I don’t understand is the obsessive need we as human beings have to categorize and label each other. Nobody walks up to someone on the street, shakes their hand, and says, “Hi, I’m a straight nonsmoking white male in the $40,000-$50,000 income bracket” or, “Hello, I’m a bisexual social drinker middle class Pacific Islander female.” What you say instead is, “Hi, I’m Dennis,” or “Hi, I’m Alicia.” The reason being that all of those other things may describe Dennis or describe Alicia, but they don’t represent who they are. Still, the categorizing is happening with apparently increasing frequency, and it really seems like something gets lost when we think of people only as bulleted lists of qualities, and not as full individuals with the hopes, fears, dreams, worries, and aspirations that we all have.
The belief that people become more intelligent as they get older quickly gets dispelled when you grow up and meet people your age who have the IQ of a rutabaga.
