Moments

One of the advantages of getting older is gaining perspective. When you are young you can only look forward, the past is a blur of developmental accomplishments, minor hurts and minor excitement. (Note: of course there are always those who's youngest memory is anything but minor, but I am speaking in generalities) You are far too busy trying figure everything out, including dealing with an ever changing mind and body that you don't have time to really scrutinize what has transpired. Eventually, you start to have some perspective but that perspective is tainted by the inability to look at yourself objectively. You are your whole world and everything that happens to you is of the most amazing importance and effects you emotionally in such a way that you feel you will never recover. Your life is your family, friends and your high school, a small fishbowl existence where you only see what is in the bowl. From your perspective the great beyond looks distorted and unreachable.

Then you get a little older, you have to leave the fishbowl and enter an aquarium or a pond, maybe even a lake, river or ocean. Suddenly you gain real perspective. You are not the entire universe, everything that happens to you is not that important and the everyday things you worried incessantly over a few years ago seem beyond meaningless. Where once you could remember in painful detail everything someone said to you, what they were wearing, what you were wearing, and how you felt, suddenly the days blend together and you start to realize that life is merely moments.

When you start to turn and look back at where you have come from, you see only the moments that made you happy or sad or angry or disappointed. If you are lucky you realize that you can harness your new perspective to make the most of "moments". You can create moments that will have a profound effect on your life and the lives of those around you. Most importantly you can hold on to the feeling of those moments so that you can use that power when you need it to inspire you or keep you from doing something you shouldn't.

Learning to enjoy the moments of your life keeps you moving forward, gives you something to hold on to and something to look forward to when the day-to-day minutia overwhelms you.

“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
Charles Du Bos

Fair or Fare?

My ex-boyfriend didn't leave me with much to hold on to after the demise of our relationship on no less than four different occasions. However, there was one little gem that he often repeated that I carry with me to this day. I suppose he heard it from his step-dad ( a no-good abusive SOB) but I think he relayed it to me because he recognized my innate sense of fairness and subsequent constant disappointment in the human race for the lack of fairness I witnessed every day. Whenever I was expressing my passionate outrage at whatever injustice I had witnessed, usually punctuated with something about "fairness", he would say..."Fair (fare) is what you pay to get on the bus."

The first time he said it, I was annoyed but upon reflection I had to admit he was right. There is no such thing as true fairness. It is nearly impossible for most people to leave their personal prejudices out of the equation when evaluating the "fair" thing to do. It takes a lot more effort than most people are willing to invest to consider all sides of a situation. We like to say that there are "two sides to every story" but really most situations are multi-dimensional and upon examination are deeper and more complex than anything you can see on the surface.

It is something that I still have to learn to accept on a daily basis...life is not fair, people are not fair and there is little you can do to change that. So what's a fair-minded girl like me to do...besides rant and rave and give myself a headache?

I've opted to embrace a well-known phrase as my antidote to unfairness..."do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I can't change other people but I can try to reflect what I want to see in others through setting my own example. It may not change the world but I have to believe that the point of view I have to offer may help someone to think of fair as more than what they pay to get on the bus.

“Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.”
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Heavy Lifting

Okay, I acknowledge that I'm not ALWAYS responsbile. Sometimes I speed, sometimes I'm late to work, sometimes I forget to call someone back when I say I will. But for the most part I am a responsible person, probably to a fault. Which leaves me in this constant state of anxiety. I am anxious because I am concerned about not just doing a good job but doing the best job. I am anxious because I know if I readily do a good job that throws up a flare to my less responsible counterparts that someone else is willing to do the work, so they can just relax. I'm anxious because their willingness to accept their own irresponsible behavior is annoying and frustrating.

The irony is, that try as you might you cannot avoid the heavy lifting. You may be able to manipulate someone else into doing it for you for awhile (us do-gooders who somehow ended up with a mutant gene of common courtesy are usually the ones being manipulated) but eventually it will catch up to you. You can run from everything except yourself. Wherever you go, there you are. So if you need to change something about yourself, you need to behave in a more responsible way, you need to own up to what you do, you won't be able to avoid that forever.

Whether you believe in past lives or not, it seems pretty apparent that some people have a rougher time of it than others. Those people seem to be under a boulder that they can never cast off. Those particular people fall into two camps: those that resent it and find it necessary to tell everyone how miserable their life is; and those who embrace it and work to make things better despite their circumstances.

I hope I fall into the the latter category. My boulder is not as big as it used to be but it's still there. It's reminding me that I still have far to go before I can put it down, that my responsibilities are large and that I have the ability to be an example for others. So I follow my path and carry this weight and I hope that someday I will be able to cast it off and say I have done my part.
"Boy, you're going to carry that weight, carry that weight a long time..." The Beatles

The Moment ...Things Will Never Be The Same

In relationships of any kind, there is always a moment when something happens and you realize that things will never be the same again. Sometimes, that moment brings about a change that pushes the relationship forward, secures it, gives it new life or meaning. But often, that moment is the beginning of the end.

What's odd about these "beginning of the end" moments is that the changes leading up to them are small, almost imperceptible things. It's as though you have been driving down a road with warning signs reading - Dead End ahead in X miles - and you haven't seen a single sign until right before you get to the dead end. And those moments are usually filled with the surprising realization that you didn't see it coming, when in restrospect you should have known all along.

They are milestone moments when you see clearly that what you believed has fallen away and exposed the bare naked truth. There is sadness and regret. Sometimes there is desperation and disbelief. That is particularly true when you aren't really ready to let go of the relationship.

And when they happen, there is a moment that follows where you hope you are wrong. You hope that the sign reads - Road Construction, instead of Dead End. Maybe the relationship is just under construction for awhile and it will be good as new after some much needed attention. You hope that you didn't miss the signs along the way. And if you find out you did miss the signs, you hope you have the will to turn the car around and follow the detour until you find a new road.

MoM Knows the Naughty Words

Preface - Okay, this is actually an old post from another blog that I created and then forgot about it. Typical. My writing is a lot like my thinking - random, messy and forgotten about the moment a new distraction comes along...oh, look a donut!

Blogging...what a great idea! Post your thoughts in cyberspace because that's a better place for them than your head. Personally I am always trying to get the voices to stop speaking to me all the time. Maybe if I write down what they are saying and send it out over the black hole of the internet, they will go away...haha.
I came across this website today...http://www.avsweb.com/mom/ (don't you just love google?) The site is advertising a monitoring software but if you read it, you will have to laugh. First, the tag line is "Simply the Best Web Monitor for Tracking Your Kids or Employees Online". Anyone who equates their kids to their employees has more issues than anyone should know about. But my favorite part was the "MoM knows the naughty words", MoM comes packed with its own list of "default naughty words," as well as less-obvious words to track, such as "blood," "kill," "bludgeon" and so on. Okay "kill" I can believe, but what kid or adult for that matter uses the word "bludgeon"? And if your kid is using the word "bludgeon", maybe he/she has been reading too many gothic novels...step into the light my friend!
I'm not sure what I did for entertainment before the WWW, but I am in serious danger of developing chair butt from amusing myself online.
If the MoM software really wants to look for words that could be a problem on the internet, "teen" should be one of them. Type in "teen" in any search engine and you will be bombarded with porn websites...which makes me seriously wonder about the mental health of the average American. How did sexual freedom turn into sexual perversion? Is it just me or is the idea of having sex with another consenting adult that doesn't involve, whips, chains, candlewax, "toys", other people and/or devices, somehow become passe? Wow, you do it in missionary position, you are so 1959.... If I wanted gymnastics in bed I would have married Bart Connor (Paul Hamm for you younger folks). Personally, the idea of being injured while having sex seems like something you would avoid.
It's nice to think that a software program can protect your kids from "naughty" words but they still need a real Mom to help with that.