A Delay

It's been a while between posts. I apologize for that, but life has been hectic. Service projects, school projects, work projects, family projects, dating projects, etc. have all taken a toll on my time. And you know what? I can't complain. Life is good. Life is GREAT! So, in lieu of my planned "grammatical tirade" as Madelyn has so eloquently coined the majority of my posts, I've decided to play the serious card again. I don't get to often, so each chance is refreshing. I guess I've been thinking a lot about the human experience lately. Some trite truisms would have us believe that "We're born, stuff happens, we die." Well, yes, that is ultimately true. But it hardly seems to encapsulate the sheer breadth and depth of our lives: the STUFF, people, is BREATHTAKING! Imagine what goes on in a typical day--your cells regenerate themselves, dying, reproducing, regenerating, going through a million tiny lifecycles that you never perceive. You feel the sunlight on your skin, the PERFECT amount of ultra-violet, yellow light and heat to maintain what we know as life. Life and death cycles around you and in you always. Most of us take these things for granted, and that's OK, because if we all stopped to appreciate the beauty and splendor of the little things in our lives, nothing would get done. There'd be a lot of auto-pedestrian accidents involving people who were marveling at the intriguing binary texture of roughly smooth asphalt while the oncoming driver was taking in the sheer amount of Nagas that must have been killed to produce the nagahyde covering his steering wheel. And that would hardly be a good day or good stuff for either person. We usually don't celebrate things that are out of the ordinary, no matter how extraordinary the mundane can be. Most days aren't "special." No one saves a tiny little grandma from the burning building every day. Well, not many people, anyway. But occasionally, there are days where you do something worth noting. ALL OF YOU DO THIS STUFF. Stuff that, for some reason, makes people stand up and go "oooooooh." Those are nice days. Those are the days you break away from the ordinary, where you reach outside of yourself and stretch beyond the borders of your soul. You redraw the lines of your map and paint them a little further out than they had been before. A little bit larger, your own empirical self-expansionist. And by doing that, you allow more people to participate in your life. And what are we if not car friends on this strange road trip of life? But you know what's most fascinating about us? People are painfully beautiful. Here is some of the most beautiful stuff that we do: We cry for the thousand empty shoes that will not be tied today; we ache for the people we leave behind, the faces we never knew well enough, the hands that once loved us and now beat us; we regret the roads we took, the doors we shut, and the choices that led us to today; we wink, we sway, we nod, we dance, we tap fingers, we secretly sing at the top of our lungs when we think no one is around, we twirl, we flirt, we smile, we laugh; we stand on rocky peaks simply to watch the sun rise, just as it did yesterday, and just as it will tomorrow; we waste, we use, we repeat; we think nothing of helping someone when we can't even help ourselves; we talk to each other, we make each other laugh, we delight in each other's smile, we worry about each other, we care about each other, we cry for each other. Man. we are cool. (Note: this image comes to the BWP via http://www.smokingdrum.co.uk/?p=31. Visit the blog--there's some cool stuff. Thanks!)