I’m usually as upbeat as possible for a person who legitimately should have died 3 or 4 times over the last twenty years. I think my posts reflect that I can be at the same time serious about life, enjoying life, and making fun of life and life’s attempts to abandon me. But the past week has taken a toll on me. I haven’t found a lot to keep my spirits up without working really really hard at it myself.
Every day brings new opportunities for honesty, understanding, and collaboration. These are the things that make the world a reasonable place for such a diverse group of people to share. It used to be that only the nuts with an antisocial media account would be telling you that their way is the only way, they are right and everybody else is wrong. But now normally rational people have hopped onto the “I am right, you are wrong and never the twain shall meet” bandwagon. Every day brings new opportunities for mankind to demonstrates how little tolerance we actually have for, well, for just about everything.
Here are some certainties that aren’t. In truth not all cops are killers, not all protesters are anarchists. At the same time it is also true that not all cops are blameless and not all protesters are righteous. Wait. What? How can this be?! Yes, it is true, not everybody in a group as a profession, or party, or country, or race, or those with exactly the same length of their left thumbs share 100% all the attributes of every single other person of the same grouping. Our pea sized brains surely will not explode if we do not lump all of a type into a single category.
There are no absolutes in the world. Even the adage nothing is certain except death and taxes isn’t so. Taxes are easily avoided if you’re willing to do some work. If you don’t think you should have to pay income tax on your new fall outfit you can buy it in a state that doesn’t tax clothes. If you feel you are paying too much income tax, move to a country where taxes are not levied against your earnings. Don’t want to pay the transfer tax on a the purchase new house? Remodel the old instead. Death is a little trickier. Eventually all of us will succumb to something but it’s pretty certain that with proper care and again a little work on our parts, we can extend our time here. Cancer, organ failure, and rare diseases are no longer the harbinger of inevitable demise they were. I present me as Exhibit A. If we can avoid or at least mitigate the dynamic duo of death and taxes, we can certainly learn to recognize gray areas in other aspects of life and live with them comfortably.Consider this. Not all mushrooms are poisonous, some are tasty, some of the tasty ones are poisonous. You don’t have freakishly superhuman intelligence to accept these somewhat contradictory thoughts can be simultaneously true. You may “like mushrooms to death” but you also know that certain mushrooms can lead to actual death. Those you learn not to eat. You can determine which are good to eat and which are not either by completing an intense focused education including identification of natural toxins and become a mushroom expert or you trust experts to do this for you and buy what has been proven safe for human consumption. The key is the work behind the expertise and trust in the process.
There is no single facet of life that is an absolute this or that, right or wrong. Except for the fact of life that there is no facet of life that is an absolute this or that, right or wrong. Go ahead, I dare you to prove me wrong. Or right. That should keep some people busy!
Ah, now I feel better.
The Real Reality Show Blog 
I agree with absolutely everything you’ve said–except one, I believe there is an absolute God with absolute truth who has absolute power over judgment. Other than that, we’re 100% in agreement!
I’ll concede the point. God is an absolute and yet even He gets trash talked.
You are so right, my friend! And funny to boot.
I am hoping that since this post is more than a month old that you are feeling better? I hope so. I felt the same as you expressed but I do feel that there is hope. So glad to know a vaccine is coming. Surely humans aren’t meant to be caged. Be well.
Thank you for your thoughts. I’m doing well and still trucking along! I hope you are well also. I always look forward to reading you! Not too worry … Our cages will be opened soon enough!