The Rules...

Here's the thing, when you're busy feeling bad about yourself, it's really hard to feel anything for or about anyone else. It's the truth...one that you can't fight. Oh, you can try, but I'll wager you'll lose. There are a billion little rules that I've learned in the past fifteen years...ones that I'd fight for, or over. It's hard to argue when you don't walk face first into the scenarios every day, yet strangely, people do. I might never fully "get" that, but I try to shrug it off, and I try to articulate those lessons without sounding like an ass, but reality suggests that you always sound like an ass when you insist on something's absolute certainty.

This is what I know...

- there's always a reason...a story. In a social/emotional sense, nothing happens randomly.

- what you do and say, and how you act matters...always.

- lonely, frightened, damaged people are capable of anything.

- you'd be surprised at what can change a life, alter a path, make a difference...it's not what you think.

- good wins...and good can be mined from even the most tragic of circumstances.

- more people are lost and drifting than are anchored and certain.

- everyone wants to be loved, acknowledged, belong, and have value...everyone.

- very few people don't care...everyone, or very nearly everyone, cares about something.

- put your faith solely in something or someone else, and admonish yourself of all responsibility and/or ability to affect change, and a very important part of you will die.

- the only acceptable answer to the question, "why are we here?" is "to do something important."

- loss, or perceived loss, is maybe the single most pervasive emotional trauma we experience.

- being who we truly are is a difficult thing to do, and most people fail.

- you don't want to go to jail...ever.

- drugs...substances, period...make us less than we can be...period.

- if you don't make yourself into something then the world will.

- your children will soak up vast parts of you, and that is a scary thing. Our goal should be for that notion to inspire us.

- it is impossible for you to be something that you've never known or seen...impossible.

- if there's a part of you that is empty it will fill up with something. You can decide what that is, or not.

- Adam Duritz said it best when he said..."we all wanna be something beautiful."