Last Friday, I carpooled with friends to hike El Cajon Mountain, and when I got back, I saw that someone had bashed the windshield of my car. At first I thought it was a freak accident and looked around for whatever had hit my car — rocks, road debris, whatever — but I couldn’t find anything amiss. The windshield had been hit dead center, and in the middle of the rings of shattered glass was a long rectangular depression, so…
I regularly rediscover that the secret to happiness is learning to be happy with what you have. I always forget that bit of wisdom, and then I witness Life happening to other people, which reminds me all over again. It’s a challenge for most people, though; people usually want what they don’t have, and that want — it could be anything: a new car, a bigger house, a better job. They see what other people have and think to themselves,…
I’m a reasonable and an emotional person, like most people, and it’s taken me four decades to finally look at myself in that way and start to see my reasoning and emotions in a more objective way, to try and detach myself from the processes of my mind and my heart and balance the two. It took meeting certain people, being with them, and learning from them to get to that point, but I had to see for myself the…
A migraine plagued me on New Year’s Eve, so I’m starting 2017 a bit late. This is my first blog post of the year! Popular culture calls 2016 a rough year; it was for me, too. I do a personal year-end summary every New Year’s Eve, and 2016 was brutal — so many changes and uncertainty career-wise, among many other things. So I look forward to seeing improvement this new year. Without getting too detailed about my goals, I do plan…
I was a huge fan of epic fantasies as a preteen — that’s the genre of Game of Thrones. Back then I read David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and Stephen R. Donaldson, and like George R. R. Martin with A Song of Ice and Fire, they each had a long-running series or two at least five books long. What these stories often had in common were incredibly long journeys across a vast land of some sort, through rural, wild, and untamed areas,…