A Moment

Looking through an old box of photographs, I am reminded of how everything is constantly changing. Children grow up, people move, relationships slowly (or sometimes suddenly) disappear. This box of photos and trinkets, tells the story of where I've been and who I've been and the people who have left an impression. The meaningless, the forgotten… they aren't in there.

When I think about all the people I say are important to me today, I wonder – how long will they be here? When I pick up this box in five years from now, will they be anything more than a face in an old photograph?

How does one deal with that question? How do we carry around that kind of risk in our lives? Because for every face in every photograph, a piece of me is there, in that moment with them.  And I can never get it back.  

 

Ideals

An ultimate standard of perfection.

Is it possible to assign such a standard of perfection to someone, that we can no longer see them for who they are in reality? Their faults, their flaws,   all becoming hidden behind the image we've set up to shield us from the truth.

And what happens when that standard fails, and our eyes are opened to all that we've worked so hard to evade?

In that moment, when my world is crushed by the humbling reality that he isn't who I thought he was, I have to ask myself: is it my fault or his that my image of him has changed?

It's been said that "when you know more, you do better". Sometimes I wonder whether or not that is really true. But I can't argue with experience. Life only hands out truth; you and I can perceive it through whatever lens we choose.

Everyone has ideals of something; of themselves, their family, life in general, love. Sometimes what we think should be is so far from what ever really will be, that disappointment becomes our ever increasing expectation. Sadness looms in that reality. Today, I am choosing not to live there.

So if you're calling me a realist, I say thank you. I love, I experience, I know things as they are; and my life is overflowing. It's a new kind of happiness that I never comprehended before. Suddenly, everything I've dreamed of is here.