Category: life

I have a weakness in perspective. I look at the life I have lived and compare it to the life I dreamed of living. There are so many places where it is easy to percieve failure and success; I focus on the “failures” and judge my life from that view. But it’s false judgement. Our lives are what we wanted to do, what we did, where we succeeded, and where we failed, not some zoomed in, pixelated, binary (success/failure) picture without context.

You pick up the bag with the frayed edges, with the worn and discolored handle, and you take your pain with you. That’s how you get to the next day.

The purest expression of love is putting someone else’s wants and needs ahead of your own.

Understand that asking a person suffering from PTSD to revisit their trama when they aren’t ready or willing is the same as asking them to let it happen again.

The people who need you the most are not obvious or easy to find. They are hiding from you.

I understand being softhearted now in ways I didn’t as a younger man. It’s akin to eating unseasoned food, like a steak, when young. Then life adds seasoning, with failure, loss, heartbreak, success, love, and appreciation, and the definition of a soft heart takes on a clarity that is both dramatic and pleasantly surprising. One day you realize precisely what “sweet pain” means.

When you are sensitive, attentive, analytic, and logical, you likely live in a personal mini-hell. Allowing oneself to care means the observational data is presented to your heart and mind in equal measure. Mix in the mistake generator that runs in our background, and we have this incessant analytical process that weighs whether we care selfishly or unselfishly, when that changes, and when it matters. Relax.

That means you aren’t a monster.