Month: May 2015

Life Is A LIttle Kid

You never know what will happen when you wake up in the morning. What will this day bring? If I wake up with a positive soul, will the day always bring goodness?

It’s impossible to know what will happen, but comfortable to know that I can respond to what happens in a positive manner. I’d like to believe that I could be okay with anything if my soul is happy and confident in its place.KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

I’d like it if the place I live every day would feel so balanced that I would not let the events of the unfolding day undo me. It’s so transitory, this life, this happiness, this state of mind. Going to work at 7 o’clock and being fired from your job at three o’clock might be a prime example of “stuff happens.” In fact, my friend did just that, and his life and his marriage and his sense of well being flew out from his neatly ordered life and smashed against the tenuous walls of sanity — and we are never sure where we really weigh in on this scale until crap like this happens — and the day he thought he was going to have changed the course of his life irreparably. It’s a crapshoot at best.

Every day can melt without incident into the next until the two by four of chance, the four by four of fate, or the four by six of catastrophe crushes our internal senses into paying attention again.

Life might say, “Look at me!” like little kids do to their moms on the playground. And perhaps Life is just a little kid, playing quietly at times, but challenging us to keep on our toes while it passes off scrapes and scratches at times, but presents us with broken legs, broken hearts and broken dreams at others. We try to keep up with the lessons our kids teach us, including the kid that is Life — and sometimes we fail.

That means learning the lesson all over again later. Life (the Life kid) is good at this. “You didn’t learn last time, so here it is again,” it seems to say.

We wake up the each morning, wondering what the Life kid will bring. You never know if you’ll be fired, be handed a divorce paper, go to the hospital, or win the happiness lottery. One day is fine and the next day is foul —like the weather in Chicago.

Dealing with whatever Life brings makes us strong, or crushes us, and while they say what you’re given makes you stronger… I don’t know about that one.

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Borrow

We borrow our identities when we give in to outside approval. It’s a counter-force to innovation if we listen to the inner voice that says, “What if they don’t like it?” It squelches the courage to ship. We don’t need approval at the creative stage. In fact, we don’t need it at all unless we want to sell what we’ve made. Anyone knows that. And so we borrow the attention of anyone we can to ask for their approval. Over and over we ask “Did I get it right this time?” “Do you like this?” “Am I OKAY?”

My dog is persistent but at some point, he gives up, content to just be. He understands that after a certain point, his borrowing of my time and attention is an unacceptable imposition. Why don’t people get that?

What about the borrow “bank”?   If you borrow money, you use it, and  must pay it back. But when we borrow people’s time, we can never pay it back. Time is gone the minute it’s spent. One cannot be on “borrowed” time.” There’s no future to borrow from. It’s not here. The past has been borrowed out. No reserves fund that bank. It’s been cleaned out as it were by the ravages of time.

Is that what Shakespeare meant Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 75–77  by “Neither photodune-1687970-precious-time-concept-clock-ma borrower nor a lender be.”? The verse continues, “For borrowing or loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” I think Polonius was really talking about money, but  the application to the idea of time is all the more appropriate. Really… don’t lend your time, and don’t ask to “borrow” it from someone else. You cannot give it back.

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