“The End.”  There’s something definitively final about those two simple words. Those two, three letter words appear on the screen when the last words of the actors have fallen into an irretrievable silence and the screen has been swept barren of images.  They pen an irrefutable and final ‘period’ on the last page of novels beyond which sentences … [Read more...]

The pen is in our hands and the paper sits spread before us.  The words are waiting to be penned.  All of that’s there.  But in the writing what’s often missing is not the pen or the paper.  What’s missing is thought. We’re not thoughtful.  Rather, we’re reactive.  It’s the negative that drives our reactive responses.  When something negative … [Read more...]

We’re a terribly independent sort.  There’s a bedeviling, yet fundamentally inherent need to be free of anything that we might have to be subservient to, or pass any degree of credit off to.  We want to pen the lines as the single and sole author of the text. Yet, despite our convictions to the contrary we all worship something.  We all have our … [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...]

It seems that we have some vague and rather ethereal sense of where we’re going in this thing called life.  For the more contemplative soul, that sense might be quite refined.  For the casual traveler, it might be a bit more nebulous and scattered.  In many cases where we’re going is far more rigorously defined by all the places where we don’t want … [Read more...]

We’re a terribly independent sort.  There’s a bedeviling, yet fundamentally inherent need to be free of anything that we might have to be subservient to, or pass any degree of credit off to.  We want to pen the lines as the single and sole author of the text. Yet, despite our convictions to the contrary we all worship something.  We all have our … [Read more...]

We always have, and we always will have the intrinsic need to believe in something.  Life is a journey whose demands will always exceed whatever personal assets we might possess in an attempt to meet those demands.  Life always has and life always will require more of me than I have within myself to give it.  All of my accumulated resources … [Read more...]

“Thank you for talking to me!”  His words were surprising, direct and intentional.  Yet they were woven warm with all of the enchantment and depth that makes a human being unlike anything else in all of existence.  His words were heavy and labored, being nearly lost in his thick Hispanic accent.  His smile lit a face deeply etched by the lines of … [Read more...]

Larry Elder said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”  How many of us have a bunch of wishes that are nothing but wishes and become nothing more than wishes?  As time goes on we get tired of wishing because they come to nothing more than wishes.  We assume that wishes remain only that and that they are not capable of being moved from the vague … [Read more...]

“That’s good enough.”  How many times have those words come out of our mouths?  The idea of this lackluster commitment to the living out of our lives has become so prevalent that we’ve learned to articulate it in a whole bunch of different ways.  The rather robust vernacular that we’ve created to wave off responsibility and say “that’s good enough” … [Read more...]