choice

It all starts with one choice. The choice can be yours, it can be someone else that makes the decision that affects you. Whatever it is, the choice is made and things never go quite as well. Where once you were happy, you feel constrained. Where once the Earth barely touched your toes as you scraped the stars with your fingertips, you now feel like Atlas with toes scrambling to purchase at nothing. Everything is on top of you.

And you think that things will change. You might even start off hoping that things will change. The hope wears off and glazes into a harden shell as time passes. You're in a rut. You're stuck. You have no idea where the rut is going and you can barely remember where the rut began. You feel powerless to change it. You begin to hope for hope. In time that becomes a glazed shell that deflects the light from your being. You wonder in some aspects of your world whether you exist or not. For fear of finding out you don't exist in those worlds, you shut them out.

Your life is busy but it isn't full. Your life is fast but little is accomplished. Bad things happen and it becomes easier to simply shrug and trudge on with your life. The acid of life having eaten through the very heart of your being, you become the glazed shell - the hollow one - that which has no center. You become the life that you used to wear and don't realize that it is armor against the very change that you once wished for.

You think about this every so often. And you hope one day that you'll bump out of the rut and do what you're so afraid of doing but wish to do so much. The shadow in the shell claws its fingernails out trying to break out. Powerless only because you forgot that power that once shone through your eyes - your real eyes, not the dull orbs of the armor of your life.

Every day you choose to stay there, you will. That applies at a personal level. This applies at a group level. That applies at a societal level. That applies to everything.

If I stood outside of the Universe, it would probably look about the same size as other Universes, give or take the standard deviation.

Mental Note: Women are the first to tell someone that the person has gained weight. Yet it's the last thing a woman typically wants to hear.

Asked: "When did you get grey?"
Answered, concerned: "When was the last time you had your eyes tested?"

I always say that a person is as good as their choices. I have neglected to mention that a person's choices, at a certain point, are as good as the culmination of all their other choices. But that takes too long to explain.

When you dry out the The Grapes of Wrath, do you get The Raisins of Wrath? Do they taste good in bagels with cinnamon?

Religion without God is atheism. So where's God?

Said to a child misbehaving: "The Order of Twiddling Thumbs Does Not Approve." It's all in the delivery, you know... (There's something here I'm going to play with sometime).

Asked by a recent introduction about how to be a writer: "Eat lots of alphabet soup."

Is there a 'Chicken Soup for Authors of Chicken Soup Books'?

People buy exercise and diet books to keep their dusty exercise equipment from floating away.

Some people search for meaning. I wander around kicking the dust below and mumbling, "that's not it."

Some people find what they're looking for because they define what they are looking for by their search. The answer is defined by their question.

Some people get lost on the paths less traveled. But lost to whom? The 'lost' typically know exactly where they are...