I Don't Know What ...

I don't know what topic to write about, but here are a few random thoughts:

1. You can hear of things, then you can know things, then you can understand things, and then you can feel things. It takes prolonged experience to work through all of them.

2. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." (John Lennon)

3. Doing good things makes you feel good, and if you do them often enough, you start becoming a good person.

4. You can never assume to know what someone else is going through (or gone through) without taking the time to listen ... SHHH! ... and hear it from them themselves.

5. Being a good Dad is important, maybe more important than being a provider, and while our society doesn't reward/recognize men (with money or status) for trying to be good Dads, I can't think of anything better than the emotional rewards you receive.

6. Babies are Buddhas.

7. Sadness isn't a bad thing, and maybe people slip into depression because everyone they know thinks it is a bad thing, and they don't know anyone who will just listen to them talk about it without trying to get them back to happy.

8. Emotional distress and heartache are exhausting. Be patient to those going through difficult emotional times (except high school students after break-ups ... what a blessing!), and remember that their energy levels at high noon are like yours before bedtime ... that is, assuming you're not experiencing emotional distress or heartache yourself.

9. What you think about right before sleep is what you'll be tasking your brain to work on all night long, and if you want to get even more bitter, envious or upset, think those kinds of thoughts right before bed. It does, fortunately, work the other way.

10. I'm so glad my buddy Sam made me read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, if only for this one passage:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.  

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"