Tag: life

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Dusty Feet

The road stretches on Through shallows and shoals An imitation of life Fascinating to follow Complex in detail With no end in sight They walk with dusty feet Trudging blindly on Wishing for redemption In a world of lies Soles cracked and bleeding With limping gaits They march onward To the promised land Armed with … Continue reading Dusty Feet

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1/3rd Of Me

Why are we so often surprised when acquaintances prove to be more than we envisioned they could be? When I told a marginal acquaintance today that I was excited to have a third grader in the fall, she looked more shocked than I had seen anyone be lately. Apparently to her I was the sum … Continue reading 1/3rd Of Me

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Neglecting Tiger Woods

I haven’t played Tiger Woods golf in a couple of weeks, which is about an eternity for me, but it has been for very good reasons. First off, I’ve been working on my next novel, which in and of itself is a labor of love. Quite literally. I’m writing a modern love story, a genre … Continue reading Neglecting Tiger Woods

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Games & Rhetoric

Student at teachers deskI always did well in school because I knew how to play the games, and because I bought into the rhetoric. I mean, teachers are still people, right? And they want the same type of accolades everyone else does. So, it was easy to be that good kid. You know the one, the one who the other students call the teacher’s pet, the one who sits near the front of the class and likes to answer questions.

Well, I’ll tell you a secret. I didn’t like to answer questions, but when the teacher knew she could use me to “bail her out” when no one else would admit to knowing an answer, that can certainly come back into her mind come time to grade a test, or an essay, or a research project.

Now, that’s not to say I’m not book smart, because I am, but you know as well as I do that it’s not always the smartest people who get ahead. It’s most times the people who can see advantageous situations and put themselves smack dab in the middle of them. In school, that was me. Straight A’s throughout elementary and middle school, and mostly A’s (when I felt like it) in high school. I had a pleasant attitude. More teachers were nice to me than students, and the work itself was easy.

Maybe in the end that was the biggest problem, though. If I had ever had to actually work hard for grades maybe I would have appreciated the exercise of education more after the fact. As it was, I was able to play the games, to get the grades, and to be pleased with myself, but only because I bought into the rhetoric that schools sell, the rhetoric that says school is an important building block for life.

Yet, when looking at it objectively, there are so many people who didn’t even graduate from high school who are doing fantastic things in life, who are healthy, happy, and successful by most yardsticks’ lengths. And don’t even get me started on the number of people who have gone on to higher education only to find out that the job market is saturated with people who already have the same degree they are so proud of obtaining. Continue reading “Games & Rhetoric”

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In Moderation

moderation1Remember the story of Goldilocks, the little girl who, somehow lost in a forest, happens upon the home of three fastidious bears and makes herself at home? However, she can’t seem to get comfortable at first, finding that, after trial and error, only one of these bears has her best interests at heart, or at least makes for the most comfort. The soup is too hot, too cold, and then finally just right. The chairs are too hard, too soft, and then just right. Even the beds fit the pattern, a moral to us that we can go through many challenges in life before realizes what it’s all about, what’s going to fit us best.

Goldilocks tried to fit the bears into a paradigm she had set for herself, but only one of them fit into that ideal, the one that fit right into the average,the one that strove for moderation. I read somewhere once that there was nothing wrong with most things, except that as human beings we tend to over-indulge whenever possible. I thought about that one for a long time and tried to come up with a challenge to it so as to prove the statement false. There’s a list somewhere around here.

  1. Spending time with friends
  2. Reading
  3. Listening to music
  4. Being with family
  5. Meditating

This list was incredibly difficult to make, and almost as soon as it was done I realized that even these pursuits were best done in moderation for a host of different reasons, not the least of which was that life requires much more from us as individuals, that responsibilities preclude us from doing these five things to excess. Oh, if that weren’t so!

I think back to the most free time I ever had, as a kid on school vacations, what I guess people would call staycations now, because most times we didn’t go anywhere. My mother usually still had to work, so sometimes she would bring us in with her, and we would go entire days coming up with things to do in her office. Now, my mom worked in this huge old building at Temple University, and there was a hallway that absolutely no one used anymore. It was a veritable smorgasbord of places to play hide-and-seek, of old machines to dust off and use, and of imaginations running wild.

We would go there and enjoy ourselves for the first hour or two, and it helped when some other workers’ children were there as well to slot into those inventive moments, but after that it started to get boring. It’s interesting, but we think if we have an endless amount of time and space that we will enjoy it, that we will never get bored. That’s not true, and one of the reasons why moderation is best in all things, even when it comes to free time. Continue reading “In Moderation”