Two weekdays without a post is now (thankfully) a thing that doesn’t happen often. However, life sometime gets in the way. Events come and pass. You make notes. You ride hard, then make make some more notes, before sometimes running out of steam. Or realizing how small whatever it was you were going to write about in the first place actually is. So you let it go, rightly or wrongly. I’m aware that there is unfinished business to be had on these pages. I didn’t get to finish off last week the way I would have liked, but like I said life gets in the way.

After last Monday’s post a friend emailed me to call bullshit on my good/ bad pronouncement. It was something I was planning on cleaning up at the end of the week. The gist of his email was this: Good and Bad are boring and an over simplification. In the posts through out the week I highlighted ways I fall short of being the person I want to be. Yes there is another side. One that illustrates all the times when I am being the person I want to be. When I’m not longer thinking about how I want to live my life, but out there actually living it.

No one ever lives the way they want to live all the time. Its a distraction to get caught up in all the shit you do wrong. Just as it is when you only focus on the things you do right. No one is all good, or all bad. A couple of summers ago I spent a lot of time listening to Li Young Lee podcast where the person doing the introduction for the poet said (paraphrasing) that writing about the family and love can be boring, because after all even storm troopers love their families. I’m appropriating those words for a different point than the speaker, but his words hold true here.

Its easy to categorize life as this or that, or black and white.  It’s cliche to say that everyone has their own battles, but cliches are that because in part they are true. The hope is that we (I) can accept those things as part of who I am and how I’ve experienced this life so far and move on from them while hoping to correct course for the future. It is easy to think and say that, but just saying it isn’t enough. You have to face the ways you’ve faltered in order to change how you act in the present, which is how you shape your future.