…..late in life—some might say too late—she realized that she had been merely surviving when instead she could have been exhilarating all these years.  Did she regret her passive lifestyle?  Might she have been more aggressive in her overall approach to life?  Was there still a lot of gas—more gas than she would ever need—left in her fuel tank to live an ingratiating life?  Sure, of course……but of what consequence now?  It was definitely too late for her to do anything about her boring destiny anymore—her life’s foundation had already been poured in impervious concrete years and decades prior and as such could no longer be altered appreciably in the present—thus regrets ruled the day for her and this exciting epiphany she was facing now was of no more use in the moment than an extra tonsil or free concert tickets to go see a grotesque, sixty-year-old Madonna slinking around up on stage like some sort of fossilized sexpot, all while making a complete ass of herself without even realizing it….

All things must come to an end—which admittedly is oftentimes sad and occasionally jolting—yet by definition, wherever there is an end there must also be a beginning.  Remember that the next time you begin shedding pint-sized tears over some major life-changing event.  Learn to welcome change—To embrace change, to offer it a mammoth bearhug the next time you encounter it!—for the fundamental reason change is the lone constant in our long and oftentimes complicated lives.  Change will perpetually be there whether you choose to welcome it or not.  It ain’t ever gonna go away simply because we long for that to happen and because we want to satisfy our natural desire to live our lives in an antiseptic bubble on eternal rewind. Recognizing the omnipresence of change and learning to acknowledge it as your true and constant master will inarguably make life that much easier to live in the long run.  And if not?  Life will overwhelm you sooner rather than later.

Carefully weigh what you truly want to say BEFORE you open your big mouth, not afterwards.  Because then it is obviously too late to do any good and repair a blown-apart bridge; by then it is obviously too late to undo the atomic fission which triggered the apocalyptic bomb; by then it is too to race down and reclaim the bullet you fired out of that gun in your hand.  You unvaryingly have to exercise your brain BEFORE you exercise your mandibles.  A failure to follow this glaringly simple rule should never earn you even one speck of sympathy. No, your only “solace” should be well-deserved contempt and a sleeping reservation on the cold hardwood floor in your guest bedroom.

Intelligence rules mankind, but only up to a certain point.  When some heavily-muscled, sadistic guy is in the process of gleefully kicking the living shit out of you, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good to quote erudite verses of Shakespeare and to cite Einstein’s theories regarding the futility and illogic of violence and to invoke Mahatma Gandhi’s principles disparaging physical confrontation.  That’s where virility enters the picture and there is no intellectual equivalent for said, nor will there ever be so long as natural resources are fixed while the population of ANY living organism—doesn’t matter one bit how sophisticated and advanced that organism might be—is not.  Primal physicality rules in the beginning and, most unfortunately, in the extreme end as well.

Life is constantly casting arrows in your direction, and the secret to finding happiness during your stay on Earth is by dodging as many of those arrows as humanly possible.  Furthermore, the key to dodging said arrows is to detect them as far in advance as feasible in order that you can then scheme and take appropriate evasive actions sans a hurried, nervous, mistake-prone state of mind.  This mystical quality is otherwise known as foresight, not to be confused with intelligence.

To a person who has been deaf for twenty years, even the braying of an especially obnoxious jackass constitutes beautiful music.  To one who has been blinded since birth, the sight of a northbound horse’s south end is breathtakingly gorgeous.  To an individual who was born congenitally colorblind, gazing at a bedazzling mallard drake through uber-modern restorative lenses is astonishingly revealing, not to mention lovely.  The moral of this story?  Relativity reigns supreme, just as it always has and always will.  Gray is the only color that really matters and adaptability is paramount.  Show me someone whose lifetime creed is absolutism, and I’ll in turn show you the aforementioned south end of a northbound horse and tack that person’s name squarely on the hole in the middle of it.

Trying to slow down the passage of time is about as futile as trying to pick up a greasy slice of daylight between your thumb and forefinger.  More than impractical.  Impossible to do.   Hopelessly wanting.   You measure the passage of time not with a clock or a calendar or a wristwatch, but with the proliferation of wrinkles on your face, the stealthy invasion of gray in the little hair that remains on top of your head, the increasing number of midget holes you must skip over on your belt in order to keep your trousers hitched up and still be able to breathe, and the tectonic ongoing shift occurring within your brain as pragmatism gradually replaces youthful idealism.  Time ultimately changes us—Certainly not vice versa; not even a hint of that!—independent of any superhuman measures we may take to repel or even slow its surge.  Time unfalteringly wins and human lives unfalteringly lose.  There has never been a documented case of a draw in this long-running tournament.

…..from an intellectual standpoint, she advanced further into that uncharted wilderness of ignorance than any human being ever had before her.  Not Albert Einstein, not Isaac Newton, not Stephen Hawking, not Friedrich Nietzsche, not……anyone.  She was a trailblazer nonpareil, plying invious intellectual territory no one had thought to explore previously.  And yet she received zero credit for her efforts.  Not minimal credit, mind you—NO credit.  And in the end that glaring lack of respect broke her spirit, left her depressed and embittered—a brainy Humpty Dumpty.  She had gone by herself cerebrally where no one else had thought to go before, but it meant nothing, counted for nothing, stood for nothing.  No one believed any of her discoveries anyway and, far worse, no one bothered to even take her claims seriously.  And then she thought to ask herself philosophically the most fundamental question of all:  In life, can happiness—the irrefutable currency of human sentience—be most relished as an inquisitive genius…..or as a blissful ignoramus who cares about nothing other than eating, sleeping, and fucking?…..

…..the bonds of love that held them together were tenuous…..inordinately weak…..made of sand…..and any amount of jostling, however small, risked severing them altogether.  Consequently, he resolved to sit her down upon an imperious throne and not do anything—ANYTHING, I SAY!!!—to disrupt those hallowed bonds, even it meant forfeiting all hope of happiness for himself in the indefinite future and beyond.  Said was not a particularly difficult decision for him, lest you’re thinking otherwise, because she was his undisputed princess who embodied the one true love of his life, and as such her undiluted happiness was infinitely more valuable to him than his own.  He would live his life for her from this point forward, and that would afford her the freedom to pursue interests she genuinely enjoyed sans the millstone of attending to a theoretically equal relationship hanging about her neck…..

The future is far more frightening from a distance.  Up close—when you’re finally there and caught up in the midst of it and it magically transforms into the present—that big bully off in the distance loses much of his mojo and suddenly appears quite ordinary and vulnerable and ripe for the taking.  Opportunities seem to cryptically manifest where once stood only an endless string of doubts and uncertainties.  Fear subsides and makes a mad dash for cover, while optimism and excitement wed to unbridled anticipation rush in to fill the vacuum it left behind.  Suddenly everything appears much more doable than when viewed through a telescope from ten miles away.  This is not because life inexplicably became easier; it hasn’t.  It is because life became more lucid and manageable when seen from close up.