Always look on the bright side of life. . .

The grass is never greener on the other side.






Things are never as you left them.







These are things that I have been learning lately. It probably comes off as fatalistic, and at the moment, it feels that way. It probably helps to step back and take a long view.







I have always been a proponent of change – and why not? It keeps things exciting, fresh, clean . . . like a new car. But like a new car, the excitement wears off long before the payments do. There are consequences to every choice . . . so essentially we are choosing our consequences. We want the new car, but not the 72 months of payments. This is our disease. We like our new wheels but want it to turn and handle like our old car – we like the reaction our new ultra sweet detailing gets, but we miss those memories in the back seat of our tangerine dream. Thankfully, we never try to mash the old and new car together, but we certainly do this with our lives? And we all know what happens when 2 cars hit head on . . .







I take back the grass is never greener comment, or at the very least, I take back how it reads. There is a future for all of us . . . and I think things can get better in this world . . . its just that sometimes the choices you make will not yield the results you long to cherish. I don't know how we learn to embrace the adventure, but I think we need to.







Some confessions: (Written to humanity in general, never to 1 specific person)



Sometimes I look at people and get angry that they allow themselves to look so stupid.



I hate confrontation and I lie to avoid conflict. I am afraid if you knew what I was really thinking you could not handle it. But I am seriously trying to get better – I work at it every day.



I am terribly controlling, and sadly, I don't want to change because I believe I am smarter than you.



I hate to apologize first because I believe you are just apologizing to follow the trend, and then I cannot take your apology seriously.



I cannot live with myself when I am following trends, and I have been following them all of my life.



Forgive me.

Iraq

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor—both black and white—through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.

Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. –Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967, Riverside Church