Leroy

I see a lazy man on a couch eating potato chips, watching a sporting event. His name is Leroy. I have chosen this name because it is a combination of ugly and hilarious. His wife, whom he hasn't spoken to much lately, walks by. She looks at him sadly, suitcase in hand, and tells him she's leaving. He knows he doesn't want her to go but he doesn't know how to make her stay. He thinks to himself... "If it's meant to, it will work out."

OMGNO. I swear this is the place that horrid wretched phrase came about. This man right here. I can't think of where else it could have come from. We have power over our circumstance.. and there is even more power in that realization alone. It is far more than we give ourselves credit for. Too much have I left to fate.. too much have I left to chance. "If it's meant to happen it will" feels good to say because it is just altogether lazy. It divorces us from our situation and leaves it in the hands of the universe (bad idea). I think I'd rather have a tight grip on it than feel it slipping through my fingers until I can't even feel it anymore.

If you are making it happen, and you see it happen, then it will happen because it's definitely happening and you're making it happen so there's really no question. How much more simple can it get? How arrogant are we to believe that the spirit of fate will make our car start with a dead battery as one more child dies of aids? I guess fate skips that part of the world. Time to get off the couch.

Of course it's never that easy is it? As soon as we realize we can make things happen for ourselvs... we start to do just that. I always catch myself in these downward spirals of "If I just do this..." Find the right job. The right friend. The right style. The right foods. The right community organization. If I do that I'll start to feel like I wasn't raised on Mars. I won't get sad or disappointed. I will feel like there is a plan to my existence.. a reason for my very being. But my God... this just is not so. A friend said to me, "Happiness is now." How much simpler does it get?

Life is just one heap of trouble, pain, inconveniences, stabs in the back, decisions, mistakes, disappointments, confusion, high expectations, low outcomes... and how the list goes on. Are we not just lucky that if for some strange 5 second period, we are smiling? If for 5 minutes out of the week we are laughing from our soul... and not just doing it to feel like we belong in the situation... if for 20 seconds in one day we feel like we belong somewhere? Anywhere?

The library. Studying our favorite topic- knowing that we were made to do something that not everyone we meet could do. To catch a glimpse- a picture of who we could be. To be more than we have discovered yet.

In someone's arms. Knowing that we are loved to a degree that we don't have to worry that we will be left. And I won't say "even if it's just your mom..." ESPECIALLY if it's your mom!

By ourselves with the freedom of knowing we are comfortable in our own skin.

In a town we could give someone directions through with our eyes closed and a sock in our mouth.

....I believe that any amount of time that we feel like we belong somewhere is the most happiness a human can feel. So if for 2 seconds in the next hour this feeling comes, then it is well worth the wait of a week... a month... a year..... or a bad situation that felt like it would never end.

Do not surrender to life, because it will not surrender to you. Don't think for one instant that the rain will stop being a problem just because you bought an umbrella. Because soon after the wind will gust by and break it and you'll have two problems instead of one. And then you'll wish you would have enjoyed that moment you had a working umbrella instead of a piece of fabric wrapped around a stick. And then you'll wish you would have sat in the passing sunshine that came and went in 30 seconds instead of saying to yourself "Why can't the sun just stay out?"Make life the best it can be.. why? Because you can.

And as for you, Leroy: go get your wife before she finds an even lazier man with an even less attractive first name!