Ladies and Gentlemen, beloved readers – this blog is on temporary hiatus while I
Figure Things Out.
My apologies.
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Love and sunshine to all of you; I’ll be back soon.
“The culture we live in is very afraid of emotion…and yet we are starved for it.”
(Dennis Krausnick)
Can I talk to you for a minute? It’s kind of important.
I want to talk about something that doesn’t get mentioned a lot. I guess it’s the kind of thing that no one really discusses – getting caught talking about it in a serious sense is kind of embarrassing. I know this might be uncomfortable for some of you, but just stick with me for a little on this one, ok?
I want to talk about Love.
“Success is not final; failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” (Winston Churchill)
I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re the kind of person who wants to truly accomplish things in this lifetime, you’re going to fail occasionally. Sometimes you will fail in huge, massive, terrifying ways. That’s sort of the way it is.
Now I know (trust me, I know) that failure sucks. It’s scary and no matter how many times you experience it, it will always give you pause when you start something new. “OK, now what could possibly go wrong?” We are all of us perpetually aware of how we might fail in our projects and in our lives – it hangs around like that stray cat you may have fed once but now just won’t ohfortheloveofgod GO AWAY.
Right?
I stumbled across the prompt below in my travels around the internet, and it struck a chord. So, I set a timer and started writing, and this is what came out. If you want to try it, I recommend it – if only to make you think.
If you knew you were going to die in 14 minutes, what would you want to say to the world?
“Everything will be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.” (unknown)
Seriously, Bobby McFerrin (the musical genius with mind-control powers and more talent in one dreadlock than I have in my entire extended family) has said that the song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was one of the biggest regrets of his career. Why? Because that silly little song is how pretty much everybody knows about him. But c’mon Bobby, practice what you preach:
Today, BBC News ran this article about particle physics.
For most of the world, particle physics is not a particularly riveting subject. Even after reading the article – which describes a series of recent experiments that discovered some particles in the universe that can travel faster than the speed of light – most people are still not all that impressed. So there’s a bunch of particles that move really really fast, hey hurrah, how is this news?
But actually, this is a really, REALLY big deal.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-CHANGES! Turn and face the strange! (David Bowie)
Have you ever wanted to run away somewhere, just for a little while, to escape your troubles? In college, the standing joke between my roommate and I was “That’s it, pack a bag, we’re running away to Mexico” (in case you are wondering, she was the translator and I was the maraca player in this fantasy world. Just go with it).
Honesty is the best policy.
If I had a nickel for every time I had heard that cliché, I would be typing this on the beach of my private Caribbean island while servants fed me grapes. Which would be really, really awesome, but is not the primary focus of this post. Alas.
Honesty and truth-telling are the primary defining characteristics of the archetypical “good” person; so much so that we ascribe these traits to some of our greatest moral heroes (Honest Abe, George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington, etc). We are taught to be truthful from a young age, and the lesson is reinforced by our peers – being a “liar liar pants on fire” was on par with Original Sin in elementary school, as I recall.
It’s funny how scary things are only scary until you do them.
Fear is the wall we build around our comfort zone to keep out the unfamiliar and to keep us “safe” from perceived harm. But I have discovered (after much trial and error) that in most cases, the wall we thought was impossible to pass through is actually nothing more than a thin shell. Once you take a deep breath and close your eyes and go for broke and charge ahead and brace for impact, it turns out that the terrible horrible things you thought were certain are, in fact, not there or not really that big a deal. It’s sort of like the first time Harry Potter makes the trip to Platform Nine and Three Quarters. Totally terrifying, right until it’s not anymore.
image from Google
We psych ourselves out worrying about every possible misstep, everything that could go wrong, and all the horrible miseries that will be visited upon us should we go forth into certain failure. but here’s the thing:
It usually never happens. Continue reading
I adore blues music. Honestly, I have yet to meet a genre of music I didn’t like. And no, I don’t mean that in the “I say it but actually I only listen to hip-hop and sometimes rap or a little almost-country” – I legitimately have everything from bagpipers to death metal and I enjoy it all. But I do really love and appreciate blues music, because it has a kind of spirit and life that you don’t get much in other genres.
But after listening to it for a while I can’t help but think: for god’s sake, cheer up already, would you?