Paint Yourself A Picture

Imagine if you will, being asked to stand outside every day for a year to paint a picture of the life you wish to have for yourself. If you desire so make it five, or ten years, make it a life time if you feel that what you want will evolve as the world changes around you. Now, let me ask you this... Do you think that the conditions of each day will be ideal for painting? The reality of the matter is that you may be painting a majority of this picture in a storm. This is life. It will almost never be how you see it, but if you keep painting with the wind in your eyes, and grit on your canvas, believing in your heart that what you're putting out there is beautiful, picture after picture, then how it looks in the end doesn't matter, as long as you keeping doing what you're doing with passion.

"When we are born, we cry that we are come. To this great stage of fools." - King Lear

I've cried all sorts of tears. It takes but nothing to cry, it's natural. I was born more or less the same as all of you, screaming and crying, no doubt for being thrust from the womb all slathered in blood and fluids, cold and naked, into this cruel and unusual world. Oh yes, it is true, the world is cruel and unusual. Further more, it is also true that it takes nothing to cry but the will to let it happen when we feel emotional.

I will, in as short a way possible, share an emotional tale as true as the sky is below our feet when we dream. On February 14th, 2014, a day known by most as Valentine's Day, I found a movie ticket stub in the inside breast pocket of a coat I was wearing at work. The peculiar thing about this ticket stub was that it was from a movie I saw exactly two years earlier to the day, February 14th, 2012, with a very significant ex-girlfriend, the day she told me she loved me for the first time... Without getting into her backstory, or rather our backstory, the gravity of those words was tremendous to say the least. I was floating on them, until it all came crashing down. I had cried like a fool over her, but I did not cry when I found the ticket stub. I stared at it pensively, and laughed a little. Why cry anymore over her? A year after we broke up she put me in a position to cheat on my next girlfriend, then essentially ended our friendship of four plus years (a quarter through which we dated), more or less because things didn't go her way. They didn't go my way either, really. I get that all is fair and love and war, but she tried to put it all on me, the - whatever... I was happy, and I ended up being happy again with someone else (that's a story for another time), but finding that ticket really made me think about love, and what I expect to get out of the insanity of it. I'm single now. I'm not entirely lonely however, I'll say that much. I think this is a good thing... My life is changing, as it tends to do, and as it has before, love will find it's way to me when I'm doing the things that I love.

I have an old movie ticket stub to burn. Goodnight...