You obviously always want to control the circumstances surrounding you, but on not infrequent occasions those circumstances—all willingness aside—will take control over your body instead and render you a helpless bystander. Call it fate or destiny or fortune if you want; an outcome is far more crucial than the method of arriving at it, ergo methodology is essentially immaterial anyway.  We exercise control over some of the vagaries attending our lives, but that percentage is so miniscule as to be virtually meaningless.  Life is akin to a mammoth block of granite that we continually chip away at in an attempt to sculpt something of lasting beauty from the monolithic object.  If we’re appropriately patient and work earnestly at this Sisyphean task, over a period of many years we’ll make progress on our redoubtable block of granite—impressive, noticeable progress even.  Yet we’re never granted sufficient time to complete our crusade or to markedly transform that giant chunk of rock into anything other than its original iteration. The lesson to be garnered from all this? In the end learn to be satisfied with a job unfinished since that is an exact microcosm for the lives we human beings lead.

Life owes me nothing.  Quite the opposite, I owe life EVERYTHING!  Each new day that comes in my direction is a gift from above, a present bestowed upon me that could’ve just as easily gone to a potential being far less fortunate.  ONE egg cell from my mother conjoined with ONE sperm cell from my father to form ME.  I am just the extraordinarily lucky beneficiary of that chance union; if the presence or timing of either had been different by even a Planck length or an attosecond, someone else would have been created at that transcendent instant and not me.  I am therefore eternally grateful for a stroke of fortune that I can take no credit for and which I can never hope to repay; all I can do is jubilate over life every day like that sun-ordained bloc of time is my last one, all while giving heartfelt thanks for the pluperfect gift of consciousness. Not just when things are going rosy for Yours Truly either—That part is risibly easy!—but when the sky turns pitch-black and the wheels start falling off my life cart as well.

You cannot worry and be genuinely happy at the same time. An obvious non sequitur, I know. It’s physically impossible.  Commonsense.  Passes the intuition test with flying colors. Two emotions that organically take up residence on opposite ends of the emotion spectrum cannot co-exist amicably; they’re unspoken enemies.  Therefore, NEVER violate someone else’s happiness with selfish and unnecessary sharing of unfortunate personal information, including and ESPECIALLY as this dictum pertains to family members and close relatives. To do so is flat-out venal and inordinately self-serving.  Shoulder whatever burdens come your way stoically and with minimal complaints, but above all else keep these problems to yourself and ONLY yourself.  Dumping your personal worries out into the public square so that others, through no fault of their own, will involuntarily be forced to worry about you and your well-being is patently unfair and the epitome of egotism. Only inherently selfish people behave in such a detestable manner; considerate individuals know better.

…..the deathbed felt cold and sterile to the octogenarian’s hunched back, but she wasn’t living in this particular charmed decade anymore anyway. Her mind had left her body far behind and traveled back some sixty-five years in time, back to when she was a fetching young ingenue all over again and the undisputed talk of the town.  Awe-struck boys within a ten-mile radius beat a path to her doorstep every night of the week and would nearly come to blows as they begged embarrassingly for her indulgences, and not a day went by when she didn’t feel wholly invincible and very much the queen of the entire universe. The sublime happiness the senescent filly experienced while entrapped within this cruel time warp wasn’t some trifling, relative thing either. Rather, the ravishing debutante from yore knew it to be a permanent fixture written in the stars. She would ALWAYS be young, nubile, and an irresistible boy magnet in her sclerotic, confused mind, even if her frail body and failing heart and the calendar hanging on one wall of her tiny nursing home room emphatically suggested otherwise…..

If a difficult issue is staring you straight in the face, it is either a problem or an opportunity; there are no other possibilities, and the sole determinant of the answer is your attitude.  Virtually every issue is invariably malleable, and with a good hammer and chisel paired with a generous helping of fortitude you can almost always sculpt a workable—Dare I say favorable?—solution out of any perceived dilemma.  Of course, if you’re cursed with a chronic defeatist attitude, you’ll instinctively look for a sinister funnel cloud rather than a majestic rainbow and wind up beating a premature hasty retreat in the face of imagined danger.  The outcome of all such situations is wholly dependent upon your attitude but, then again, so too can be said about one’s overall outlook on life.

Those who love life the dearest can let it go of it the easiest.  Those who embrace life like a bewitching mistress can bid farewell to it with the fewest regrets.  Those who have been to Rome and Paris and Rio de Janeiro do not yearn undyingly for an encore visit. Those intrepid souls who have run with the bulls at Pamplona aren’t scared shitless by a docile steer stanchioned in a livestock barn at the local county fair. Such is the bizarre paradox of living: The harder you have loved, the easier it is to say goodbye to that temptress while, conversely, those who have lived life with undue caution and treated it like a fragile ornament find it most difficult to confront death and are terrified by the mere thought of their imminent demise. Once you’ve eaten all the way through a luscious apple or nearly all the way through it, throwing away the leftover core is not particularly difficult. But, on the other hand, if you never took a gigantic chomp out of the tantalizing fruit to begin with and it therefore still appears (and no doubt is) pristine…..???

Too much time of our lives–—Far too much of it!—is dictated not by what we like to do but instead occupied by what we dislike or even hate to do.  It shouldn’t be this way.  No, not at all! Each and every person should make a conscious point of dedicating their lives to the pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction, not gritting one’s teeth and finding out the hard way just how much displeasure and outright pain one human body can endure over the course of a lifetime. Such does not constitute living. Rather, it constitutes bare tolerance, which is the polar opposite of why we Homo sapiens were created and placed on Earth’s surface in the first place.  Life should be a refreshing jog through a scenic park, not a grueling marathon through a junkyard.

Stasis is our trusted friend, okay?  If something ain’t broke, for God’s sake don’t don a dunce cap and stubbornly struggle to fix it!  Change in and of itself is not inherently evil, but those who advocate for change merely because they are bored to death and yearn to disrupt the status quo are anarchists at best, stupid meddlers at worst.  Stasis and change are like identical twins, in that neither is better than the other until one starts acting up and needlessly disrupting things, at which point you should step in and take decisive action to rectify the situation…..but not one second earlier!  Change can readily make a situation better, but it can just as easily make a situation worse than before.  Knowing the difference and when change will truly be beneficial pretty much defines the word “intelligence”.

You can never outrun mistakes of the past, no matter how hard you try and how much distance you manage to traverse and how mightily you struggle to rationalize those stubborn knaves; they become a permanent part of you, no different than your physical features and your God-given personality.  You must thus somehow come to terms with your mistakes in a manner that allows you to proceed forward with a clear conscience and an unburdened mind. Mistakes will affect and bedevil EVERYONE throughout the course of their lifetimes; that much is a given and as etched in stone as Moses’ apocryphal Ten Commandments.  Yet this fact we know for sure as well: How we react to mistakes that occur spontaneously and in no logical order is the true test of one’s character and the only meaningful variable secondary to that larger-than-life equation which governs our day-to-day existences.

…..there wasn’t much she could do about the shitty situation at hand, therefore she just started crying. Crying like a big fuckin’ baby; yeah, that’s precisely what she did.  Her hands were figuratively tied behind her back and the options she was facing amounted to absolutely nothing—ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING, I TELL YA!…..so what else is a sane person supposed to do in an impossible situation such as that?  Huh?! Any suggestions?! Pertinent insights?! C’mon now, no better ideas from any of my learned, esteemed readers?!  Well, okay then, don’t even consider passing judgment on this beleaguered damsel in distress if your wits are no more sophisticated than hers. So yeah, that’s right, it seems to be agreed upon amongst all of us…..I guess you just feel sorry for yourself and bawl your lungs out like a fuckin’ starving baby howling for a Nuk. Just feel horribly sorry for yourself and curse the gods above and the demons below and hope that somebody takes pity on you and maybe offers you an encouraging word and a helping hand to carry you through your time of suffering.  It’s either that or go searching for the nearest gun holding at least one bullet in its chamber, and she wasn’t anywhere near the point of desperation where she felt like doing anything THAT stupid and THAT drastic. Ergo she cried on wailingly, lugubriously, interminably—no closer to a workable solution than before and with no end in sight to her abject despair.…..