Hard Truth(s) Of Life

If intuition means a damn thing there is a reason why I am flipping between The Bee Gees To Love Somebody and Don McLean’s Till Tomorrow but then again maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe all there is individual will and want and nothing more.

Or maybe when you hear You’re All I Need To Get By something sparks a thought, fleeting though it may be and you force yourself to turn on Love The One You’re With.

Truth is stranger than fiction and you never do know which way the wind will blow and how it may warm or chill your bones.

Hard Truth(s) Of Life

When I was a younger man, so much younger than I am today it was much harder for me to appreciate how some things in life never change.

You could tell me some things as often as you wished but there was no way I was going to accept, appreciate or understand them without the benefit of life experience.

You loved who you married and spent your time with and that was likely forever. If you didn’t it meant that you hadn’t taken the time to figure it out.

There were never situations in which two people who loved each other couldn’t be together and never situations in which irreconcilable differences created havoc other than books, TV and movies.

Yeah, I was young and dumb.

Now, I read Plato and think about how sensible some of what he said was and how easy it would be to figure it out.

“And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it’s to young men or not, then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.”
― Plato, The Symposium

But easy applies to good and bad and so I find myself thinking about the past four months or so.

A time in which a trusted leader of my youth admitted to molesting boys, the death of a friend’s 16 year-old daughter and now the disappearance of a different friend’s 19 year-old son.

And the hard truth of life is the world doesn’t stop turning or slow down at all for tragedy. Granted it doesn’t stop for victory either so it’s equally merciless about such things.

I am not suggesting that it should or shouldn’t do such a thing, merely thinking out loud about a few things that have been ping ponging back and forth inside my head.

Thinking about how some people have proven to me that my tolerance for their nonsense is unending and how others have made it clear they have worn out their welcome.

I am done with them and it is not a question of whether I will tell them so but when.

Timing is a funny thing, a strange beast we try to tame but can never do better than keep it from biting us unawares repeatedly in the softer, more painful places.

And so we find ourselves repeating words and phrases we consider wise while warning ourselves and others not to get caught by the fool with our trousers around our ankles.

Final Words

Jerry Seinfeld’s show Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee is on Netflix now.

I have been binge watching it and having a grand time riding along as the voyeur from behind the screen.

It is not just entertaining to me, I look, watch and listen for tips and clues on how to become a better storyteller.

The men and women that he speaks with share all sorts of interesting tales and tidbits and you never know when you’ll come across the gold nugget that changes everything.

And in some ways that is what this post has been about, changes.

There have been many and I feel some big ones coming. Things that will turn it all inside out and upside down.

Can’t say exactly when some will hit, but these waves will break without question break upon the shore and after they do we’ll get a chance to see what remains.

I am sort of excited and sort of nervous.

That is what happens when you know you are done and you start preparing for change. It is another hard truth of life.