What lies ahead of us is shrouded in the milky fog of mystery and the confounding muse of speculation that such mystery provokes.  What lies behind us might tempt us to mystery and speculation, but it will only do so in regard to making sense of what lies behind us.  And in this thing called ‘time’ and in this journey that we call ‘life,’ we are … [Read more...]

We have spent tens of thousands of years recklessly hacking away at creation. We sloppily remodel the world around us because it never quite suits us. It appears that there’s always some alteration that we deem to be superior to the original design. It seems that we seldom look at life long enough to appreciate the unmatchable qualities that exist … [Read more...]

No one likes pain.  We don’t go shopping for it and we don’t clip coupons trying to get it at some discount.  I don’t think most of us expend our lives in the pursuit of it, nor are we on some sort of safari with the intent of bagging it as a trophy.  In reality, when we see it coming, we typically run as fast and as far as possible in whatever … [Read more...]

We live in a world spiraling in a confounding kaleidoscopic of shoddy opinions, self-serving biases, vacillating cultural mandates, clarion calls for whatever politically-correct notion might be trending at the moment, and the elusive lure of all things vogue and trendy.  We’re frantically chasing some perpetually shifting norm that’s nothing of a … [Read more...]

“Who am I?”  The question seems a bit overused these days.  It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream.  The question suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence, … [Read more...]

We hear a lot of things.  A whole lot of things.  We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information.  It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that.  Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy … [Read more...]

The issue in life is not how many times we get knocked down.  The issue in life is how many times we get back up.  And it’s not all that difficult to figure out that if the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we’ve been knocked down, then we’re spending our lives lying down.  Life will knock us down; … [Read more...]

Too often we don’t appreciate what we didn’t work for or had to sacrifice for in one way or another.  Hand something to us with no effort exerted on our part to acquire it, and we’ll probably exhibit some scantily shallow and rather quickly fleeting degree of appreciation for it.  But make us work for something and expend actual energy in order to … [Read more...]

I grew up in the shadow of a generation who faced the depravity of the Great Depression and then fought through the horrors of World War II.  The deep sense of patriotism and solemn respect for our country ran high among these great people. Therefore, as the Fourth of July once again rolls around on the calendar, I find it appropriate to take a … [Read more...]