Love is an emotion so staggeringly powerful and transcendent that mere words have little hope of ever fully describing it.  Keats, Shelley, Joyce…..all the great English poets made a valiant attempt to do so with mixed results, yet their grandiloquent soliloquies fell embarrassingly short of capturing the true essence of love.  Actions are the only arbiter that hold any sway in the matter, and therefore actions are the ONLY barometer to recognize if you are harboring reservations about the depth of another’s feelings toward you.  Don’t be fooled by words, my naïve friend, because words are elusive, deceitful little creatures that are highly adept at the art of disappearing instantaneously into the firmament or, alternatively, they can and will turn on you unexpectedly with guns a’blazin’ in the blink of an eye or the fluttering of an eyelash.  Words simply cannot be trusted.  If her words say one thing and her actions say something altogether different, pitch those  dishonest words in the wastebasket and gird up for seismic disappointment because it most certainly is headed in your direction.  Concrete actions define intimate relationships; too many words pointlessly complicate them.

…..I’ll do it tomorrow, she said.  Yes, yes, I’ll put it off until tomorrow.  And if not tomorrow, then the day after that.  Or maybe even the day after that if my motivation is running low.  And then, through some bilious vagary of fortune, circumstances changed on a dime and tomorrow never came.  Tomorrow was no more.  And with the last dying fibrillation of her heart she thought about tomorrow, and of all the tomorrows that would forever be denied her now and in the future.  And she decided right at that moment with her next to last breath that it might be good to lead life with a certain sense of urgency, and that the future was more a mirage than a reality, and that it probably is not a good idea to procrastinate one’s life away assuming a future that is not guaranteed…..

A HUGE abyss exists between “I had a chance to…..” and “I did…..”.  That’s right, a HUGE abyss which reveals everything you need to know about another’s core character.  About their resolve.  About the strength and substance of their spine.  About their belief in themselves.  About their sense of adventure.  And at the end of the day, isn’t that what life certifiably is:  A behemoth adventure rife with opportunities?  The answer is yes, and the gulf separating wishful thinking from concrete action is even wider than the one separating New Orleans from Venezuela.  Don’t just “talk the talk”.  “Walk the walk” while you’re at it.  Who knows?   You may actually grow to like it…..

…..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.