WIT
-Sometimes I walk into Chipotle to see what the buzz is all about. But I don’t order anything. Instead I just stand at the counter and watch them make burritos until I'm politely asked to leave. Then I go home.
-Sometimes, when the bagger asks me for paper or plastic, I say both, with plastic on the outside.
-Of course it is what it is. If it wasn’t, then we all'd be really confused.
-Squirrels are better dancers than us. I’ve seen how they move to avoid four tires. Maybe we’d be better dancers if our lives depended upon it. I know this much--we were better dancers not too long ago. Back then, we danced less for entertainment and more for survival.
-I never want to hear an ER doc say: “Ok, Google…”
-Telling the cashier you need a happy meal says much about your priorities, and just how far that meal is from bringing you happiness.
-Youth soccer tournaments: where watching kids play can be entertaining, but not as much as those parents longing to be somewhere else.
-I like visiting Home Depot on weekends. So many hopes. So many dreams. So much property value. So much money. Something has to give.
-Some churches make me want to hit the pub. Some pubs make me want to hit the church.
-"God Bless America. Let's try to save some of it." -Edward Abbey
-A person’s view of money and, for that matter, other people, can easily be measured by how they tip a server they know they'll never see again.
-Someone asked me the other day if I'd found Jesus. "Yes", I quickly responded, "Just this morning I found him under a rock. He had six legs. After all, where would we be without these six-legged pollinators and deconstructionists? One thing is certain, without them there'd be no religion, no Jesus."
-I just "checked in at the corner of Main & Broadway." The Don't Walk light is flashing, but traffic is clear enough to go for it. Should I make it across safely, I'll check in "at the other side of the street." If you do not hear from me, it didn't go well.
-I just ate a fortune cookie with the fortune still inside. No idea what it said or what the lucky numbers were. Did I just hurt my chances? How would I know?
-I don't mind people sharing their religious perspectives, so long as they don't assume I'm going to their Dante-inspired idea of hell.
-Evangelizing is like a girl scout cookie contest. It operates under the belief that whomever sells the most cookies wins the prize. The prize is admission into the gated-community known as everlasting life, which apparently must be somewhere in Sarasota. Not for me, I say. That worldview is bunk. I prefer a different path....to go the way of the grasshopper, the trees, the wind. The prize for that is not really a prize but a debt of having lived, and that debt will be collected. Life is the inescapable Collections Agency.
-I avoid non-stop flights because I want to get places. I want landing in my future.
-Is it possible to develop an allergy to certain people? We do with dogs and cats and ragweed. Why not people? That'd be awesome. If there was such a thing, I’m pretty sure my allergy would be the Jones. You know the Jones—the ones who set a pace so fast that no one else can keep up? Yeah. Think of it!
“Sorry, I can’t make your neighborhood barbeque. The Jones will be there and I’m allergic."
"Sorry, Realtor. I’m not interested in buying that house. The Jones live on both sides.”
-Hey guy on the cellphone standing at the condiment stand, “Could you hand me a napkin? Also, the woman behind me would like a spoon, and the guy behind her, ketchup? Thanks!"
-"It is what it is", but only if "it" = or < "it". Otherwise, it'd be just plain weird.
-I prefer illegal memos. I like living on the edge.
-I've lost my mind. If you find it, please leave a message. Don't expect me to be coherent. Just assume I'm a rock and give it back. We'll talk about a reward when I'm thinking again. Of course, you'll have to remind me about losing my mind. Probably won't remember.
-Take this advice: live on the edge, and embrace the weather.
-When people ask me, "can I be honest with you?" I wonder if they haven't been and for how long. More disturbingly, I wonder why they need permission.
-When people say, "I don't mean to be rude" I brace myself for intentional rudeness.
-I was restless last night. The warm breeze and clear skies were calling. So I made a bed in the grass, looked up at the stars and began listening to a 13 billion year story. Then, I fell asleep and missed the whole thing. Can someone tell me what I missed?
-Timing is everything and will soon be available on Amazon.com.
-Before I tell someone what I really think, I try to walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get offended, they're a mile away and without shoes.
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ALONG THE WAY
-We all have caves in our lives. Caves that we fear to enter. There is a confrontation with a reality we have been trying to avoid that exists in there. We have to be honest inside the cave. Dishonesty never helps us. It avoids confronting our fears and cannot help us find our way out of the dark.
-Your greatest gift in life is fearlessly being who you are.
-Don't avoid the dark places in your life. That gets you nowhere. The treasures you've been seeking your whole life are not in the daylight of everyday dealings. They are found inside your dark places.
-Once we take a job in order to have money, and then buy things with that money, we become enslaved to the job, and to the money to pay for the things. We buy things to "own" them. In the end, things end up owning us.
-Some say that money buys freedom. I've been around the world and found the opposite to be true. Money buys comfort and convenience and security, but it cannot by freedom. If that were true, than indigenous peoples would not appear to be the freest people on earth.
-We’ve become so obsessed with our own outer progress, that we're forgetting the essential need for our inner growth--the awakening associated with being fully alive, with realizing we are participating in something not about our own life. Yes. That is what life is all about.
-We often think a new discovery brings answers to the restless mind. But usually it opens up new, boundless horizons instead. The journey, it seems, finds fulfillment in the quest for answers to the unanswerable, in the quenching of the unquenchable thirst.
-We may at times lose sight of who we are, but we can also become our biggest obstacle to rediscovering what we have lost. Or, we can be mindful and steadfast with our values, beliefs and passions, and never get lost in the first place.
-Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life of meaning by acquiring things from shops. Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life of meaning by doing what everyone else was doing. Little did she know, they were doing the same thing.
-What bothers me is not that we wake up and join in the race all day until we hit the bed. What bothers me is that so few of us really question what the hell we are doing.
-There is such a thing as trying so hard to be unique on social media that you just become plain ordinary. You want to be unique? Put down your f'in phone and go do something that scares you, that endangers your life even just a little bit. And don't diminish it by taking a selfie.
-Like so many parents, she saw her son as unique. He was beautiful. His laugh was infectious. His creativity and intelligence made him special. And like so many parents, she hadn’t a clue on how to nurture that. She looked to her friends and neighbors. She observed what others were doing and, thus, sought to nurture his uniqueness by going along with the others. She did what other parents were doing. After all, her child, as creative as he was, had to be as busy as the others. Always something to do. Soccer practices and tournaments. After school programs. Summer camps. Holiday camps. Social events and birthday parties. Boredom, she assumed, was the enemy to nurturing. If you weren’t doing something, you weren’t going to get anywhere. Little did she know, all the parents were listening to the same child psychologists.
-Nurturing comes through time and love, love and time. Boredom is not the idle hands argument of adults, especially if we are talking about pre-teen kids. In many respects, a child's conscience is stronger than an adults'. Boredom allows children time to figure out the subtle things of importance in life. It allows them to be creative, to develop in the arts, which is a language of the heart. And so, I am thinking that one of the great challenges today is that raising children is becoming more of a head game than a heart venture. And what we involve our children in just to keep them busy and high-functioning, often says more about the parents' wants, than it does the child's needs. Love and Time, people.
-I have been to enough youth soccer tournaments and birthday parties to see this: if it appears that the parents want to be there more than the child, it is a problem for the child. Ask yourself this, as a parent, are you telling yourself that soccer is a better way to teach your child lessons about life than spending time with them at home or exploring nature together? In your efforts to fill the child's mind with hectic schedules, are you aware of how much the heart is getting ignored?
-Parents, instead of nurturing uniqueness, found they were suffocating it with soccer tournaments and birthday parties and after school programs. What they all got was more sameness. What they were doing, all along, was nurturing their sons and daughters to live lives of quiet desperation.
-We do not celebrate failure, yet we all are subject to it. Success is to be venerated, failure is to be avoided. One is rooted in hope, the other is influenced by fear. To fear major setbacks, to fear dark moments, hard times, we find ourselves seeking a predictable kind of comfort. That itself is a reflection of what we fear most. What we seek to create says something about what we seek to overcome. And what we seek to overcome says something about what we fear will overcome us. By minimizing the chances of setbacks, that is, by establishing a level of security and predictability in our lives, we increase our ability to right the ship when it begins to capsize. But when we minimize the possibility of going into the valley, we just as much minimize the chance of reaching the summit. We are stuck on a plain. And we are forced to confront the very thing we sought to avoid all along. And we realize that while we were trying to overcome our fears, our fears were overcoming us.
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