For the first time, I heard someone use “just like when you stopped using toilet paper and started using wet wipes” as a general phrase referring to improvement.
Wait… I never heard anyone say that.
Coping
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.
Real Love
The purest expression of love is putting someone else’s wants and needs ahead of your own.
A Failure in Compassion
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.
No Good Choices
Sometimes we don’t have much of a choice. It’s either back of the bus, or face down in the road.
The Idiocy of Mandate
Making something possible doesn’t make it viable or ensure it will be done. When you want something to happen, it should have value to all those involved. True change happens when we see what’s in it for us. If the desired result doesn’t follow your efforts to eliminate barriers, and you aren’t asking yourself what you are doing wrong, your approach and solution is invalid. It’s a research, try, assess, refactor, try again loop, not a commandment.
Helping Others
The people who need you the most are not obvious or easy to find. They are hiding from you.
Softhearted
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.
Lifetime Companions
If I had my way, dogs would live as long as humans, so they and those who love them might never be separated.
Existing in a Real World
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.
Approaching Zero 