Found (Jun. 16)

It seems that most people at some point in their lives loose something or misplace something and set off into a search to find something. And then in that moment when what was lost becomes found when a feeling of excitement and relief just seems to flow through the body. It is this moment of being found which is something so good that it makes life so good and so amazing. When you feel that life is missing or that you have lost the life with which you live, it puts you in a spot where you completely lack that sense of being found. See loosing you life and the spirit with which you live it is detrimental to you health and quite literally puts you in a place where there is no chance of being able to live the life as if you are found. The good news is that if you are lost there is a process by whcih you can go through life in an attempt to find yourself. To sit around and remain lost is not where you want to be, even if you feel comfortable, becoming who you are is far more important and will allow you to live life with that similar feeling to finding that lost item and the reality is that in a sense you have found yourself giving cause for that feeling.

Alone (Jun. 15)

While everyone is built differently and desire certain amounts of social time and other amounts of alone time. There are certain people that somehow survive on very little alone time but there is still a need for time alone. When you are alone you have time to think of things that you do not normally think of. Thoughts are capable of going deeper than they normally would. But see this is something that can also be dangerous which is why one should not have too much alone time. What is more interesting is that even though a good amount of alone time is good, there is still a desire to return to places where one will not be alone. It shows the truth in the fact that humans are social creatures, in much the same way the other animals live in packs and herds. So, the point is simply this, take your alone time and make the most of it. Do not neglect it because being alone scares you or because you have some other aversion to being alone, there is some great value, but do not let the alone time hold you there away from the reality of being a socail being in need of fellowship with others. There is a fine line to being alone and one must learn to walk it wisely in order to become a better and growing person.

Waiting (Jun. 14)

It seems like we are always waiting for something to happen. Perhaps you are sitting down in front of your computer reading this now and thinking that you are simply waiting around for something amazing to happen. You have been watching too many epic movies and just dreaming on the day that your epic story will take place. Perhaps you could care less about the epic story and yet you find yourself waiting in line getting ready to order your favorite burger and fries. Then there is the waiting that you would rather not be doing, the waiting in your car as you are stuck in traffic or at that light that takes forever to change, even with no cars coming from any other direction. Weather it is the small things or the big things, life requires that you spen time waiting. It is imparitive that you maters the art of waiting because you will have to do it. Are you the type that gets frustrated and complains because the world isn't revolving around you? You will have a hard time going through life because you are going to be a downer of a person at every instance when you are waiting. Are you the person that enjoys finding the simple humor in everyday life and then point it out to the people around you and perhaps you are the person that really doesn't care what other people thing of you so you sing and dance with huge gestures as you are waiting for the next subway car. Life is full of waiting and how you decide to pass your time waiting is important not only to your own personal happiness but potentially the happiness of those around you as well.

Fanatic (Jun. 13)

Sports are an interesting thing that really brings out a unique side in the individuals who follow any given sport. Before sports the meaning of fanatic or describing someone as fanatical was probably not something that was taken lightly or in good nature. The reality though is that the fanatical spirit for a sports team has become something to be proud of, something to fight for and something that makes the individual do weird things that would not happen under normal circumstances. Think about the people who paint their faces the colors of their favorite teams or the people that go even further and paint their entire upper bodies. Sometimes gathering with a group of friends to spell out the name of their favorite team. While the actions themselves taken in general everyday circumstances are defiantely fanatical, in the realm of sports these actions are nothing more than the norm. It seems odd that with a certain context certain actions are allowed and then not allowed at other times. Perhaps the reality is that fanatical is something one should strive to do more in their lives with the things, other than sports, that someone is passionate about.

Symptoms (Jun. 12)

Doctors and other medical staff do an incredible job of visually checking over a person and taking note of what appears to be wrong but also listening to what a patient will tell them about the symptoms that they have in order to make an accurate assesment of what is or might be wrong. The symptoms themselves are a very interesting phenomenon that is often ignored as one chooses not to listen to what their own body is telling them. Often times the symptoms act as signs to point out the bigger problems that are wrong and some of the symptoms are not apparent immediately as the body has a natural response to minimize pain in an attempt to help heal itself. Symptoms act as a means by which one can not only judge the severity of a problem but also where in the healing process the body is at based on the current and past symptoms. In many ways they are like road signs, when you see them and follow them you will eventually end up at your destination but when you choose to ignore the symptoms, getting to where you need to be can be rather hard. At least when you are driving you know what your destination is where the symptoms are merely pointing you to the destination that you hope to discover at some point down the road.

Senses (Jun. 11)

There are exactly five senses that are common to find amongst human beings. These senses are what help us take in the world around us and then interpret what exactly is going on in the world. Sight is an important sense that lets one see in images what is going on in the world. Smell takes the sents of objects around them and gives them a particular aroma to go with an object. Sounds are interesting in that they could draw our attention to a particular object based completely on a non-visable wave traveling through the air. Taste is usually something that one associates with food but in reality everything tastes a particular way. And last is touch by which we can feel objects and the particular qualities related to the surface and composition of the object. Together we get a complete picture of an object that is not something any one of the senses can let us know on its own. When one sense is lacking it is often true that the other senses that are working are heightened but inevitably there is still an incomplete picture of anything that one precieves because there is no understanding of something that could possibly be understood. Of course one will be left at a point where you must question your senses and ask if they are giving you accurate information by which to precieve the world in which you live.

Fun (Jun. 10)

Every child simply wants to do things during the day that they deem fun. Adults know that in order to get to the activities that they consider fun there is a great deal of work behind it. Perhaps the adult will work a job that they do not like or perhaps they will do a job which they consider fun but have to deal with aspects of that job that are not so much fun. In general we all really want life to be fun. Fun is something that is not very clearly defined however and is perhaps more of the attitute with which things are done. The most menial job could be fun if one takes the time to see the bits and pieces of the job that are fun or that they can make fun. Fun is also something that can be tied to the struggle in much the same way that a job you do not like leads to fun. Take relationships for instance. There are defiantely going to be struggles in any kind of relationship and there will be times when you disagree and times when you want to understand but you just can't. All of this confusion and all of the struggle to get through these things are part of what makes a relationship fun. If these things did not make the relationship fun then you would not persue the relationship any further. So, in all that you do and in all the ways that you live life, take time to look for fun and strive to make things that appear to be lacking fun all the more fun.

Made (Jun. 9)

When you were a kid no doubt you made several interesting crafts that you then gave to your parents to hang on the refridgerator or some other place in the house. They were not great works of art and not necessarily anything to be proud of but as a kid they were sentimental to you and the fact that your parents seemed to like them so much put a smile on your face. But what was it about these particular items that were so important to you as a kid? The simple answer is that you made them. You took them to your parents and said, "Look what I did!" They were very simple project without much detail. Even the best artists in the work work hard to make something that they and others can appreciate. Some work in great detail and create pieces that look real while others work in the idea of being abstract. Even if you look at a photograph of a beautiful landscape there is still something missing because the detail with which one creates these pieces of art does not even begin to compare with the amazing reality of being physically at the sight of what the piece of art depicts. There is however a disconnect because the incredible detail is not something that is easy to say was made by someone. There is a disconnect because the artist it not someone you can run out and talk to. Perhaps this world of incredible beauty is all mere chance or perhaps we are simply waiting to meet the one who made it.

Hair (Jun. 8)

Hair is a very funny thing and has been the brunt of way too many jokes or stories as an excuse for nothing. It can take hours a day to perfect and only moments to ruin. It is something that grows and something that we cut and use thousands of dollars of product on every year. And it isn't like the hair needs all of the product that we spend on it but it gets it because well, we like hair. We do whatever we can to keep our hair and yet it seems that the nature of hair is to receed over time. Some have given up and hair all together and spend more time than most keeping it off of their heads. Hair is one of the first things that we notice about people and provides the perfect explination as to why we spend so much time and money on hair. Hair could determine wether or not you want to go talk to that person of the opposite sex on the other side of the room or not. It could determine in the work world wether someone gets offered a job or a sale or not. Hair holds way more power than you could possibly imagine. Yet, at the end of the day you put your head on a pillow and ruin your hair so that you will have to redo it all over again the next day. It is only hair for goodness sake.

Signature (Jun. 7)

There is something truly unique about a signature. It is something that is so a part of a person that it is usually the one thing about them that you will remember and is also used as a means of identification. If you are just signing you name on a piece of paper it still holds true to being something truly unique and you. Doctors are known to have signatures that are particularly messy and many other people have a truly unique signature that says something about who they are. But the real signatures that we should think about are those that are more defined by our personality and the manurisms that you do on a daily basis. These sorts of manurisms come out in many different ways and usually in group settings but are not limited to just those occasions. They portray a particular kind of person and usually one that you want other people to see you as. They are often influenced by the people that are around you and their particular manurisms that you pick up on. Your signature will say a lot about who you are and the enviornment that you spend a lot of time in. It is not something that you may know that you have control over, but you really do. To some extent if you start hanging around the type of people that you want to become, your signature will slowly become more and more like you may want it to be. Likewise you can also make who your are, your signature something completely hideous by not being in the right place or striving to be what you really want to become.

Reflection (Jun. 6)

It seems wise to take time out of your busy day to reflect on what has taken place. Perhaps you will make time for it daily or perhaps you only take time to reflect after a big event occurs but to lack a time of reflection shows a complete lack of desire to better yourself. If one just goes through life, never taking time to think back they may be able to claim that they are living life in the moment but the moment has the potential to be so much better if a time of reflection takes place. See there is the whole idea of not repeating the mistakes of the past and putting oneself in a position to succeed by repeating positive circumstances. Reflection may keep you from a bad investment of your money or keep you from getting into a relationship that is doomed to fail from the start. Reflection can also help you improve upon the things that turned out just okay by hopefully bringing ideas to mind as to how to make it that much better the next time around. You already take time to repeat the good experiences to family and friends who want to know what is going on in your life, why not take a few more moments to attempt to learn something from the experiences that you have had? It really does take a heart that is eager to learn from the events of the past but makes the future that much more exciting.

Conference (Jun. 5)

There are many ways to look at the idea of a conference. In sports you see it as a group of teams that play eachother more frequently than they do other teams. Perhaps in business it is simply a large meeting of like or like minded companies looking to better their practices. You even see the idea of the conference in religious organizations as well as a time to come together and grow as a larger group rather than an individual church. There is one unique idea that seems to happen at or within a conference. The simple fact is that a conference has its primary goal within its members to produce the best possible outcome forcing each member to be the best that it possibly can. Even in sports where you may hate the teams in your conference more than other teams, the goal that you have is to play the best you can against them forcing you and the other team to be at their absolute best. There may be instances where a conference has members that come and go but to simply allow a member of your conference to be less than its best is to let yourself become complacent. In order to be the best you have to align yourself with the best. It produces the challenge to become better, even if it means increased competition in the mean time.

Elbow (Jun. 4)

You may never realize how much you use certain body parts until you injure them. There are some particularly challenging ones to injure as well. The elbow might not be all that challenging of a body part to injure and the recovery may not be all that difficult but it still really hurts. Think about the times that you have hit your funny bone, which well all know resides in that one spot in your elbow. If you are fortunate enough to hurt the tendon that is in your elboe you will know it when you try and push on anything, even as simple as a book or lifting yourself out of a seat. The elbow is just one of thsoe joints that seems to get used in a lot of ways, and ways that we do not often think of. Perhaps it is the fact that we like to focus on the muscles and building them to be stronger. We lift weights to accomplish this and we eat dairy products to make our bones stronger but we often do not think of the joints and what we could be doing for them until they bother us. Perhaps your elbow feels a little sore just thinking about the potential of injuring it. Well then the best thing you can do is make someone feel awkward by greeting them by simply grabbign their elbow. Or perhaps you become hungry at the mention of food earlier and you should run out and eat some elbow maccaroni. Whatever you do, respect the elbow.

World (Jun. 3)

The world in which we live is a very interesting place. There are so many different things that make up the world like the vast oceans of water that somehow sit in particular valleys of rocks and yet not others. Mountains rise what seems like incredible distances above the waters and form peaks that seem so perfect that it is a wonder how they got there exactly. We could fly for miles around this world and meet untold amounts of people that are all sustained by the air that encompasses this planet. The world sits at a very particular distance, though not always the same distance, from a sun that provides light and heat that are vital to the survival of every thing that lives. There are literally billions of people that actually live on this planet and one could spend a lifetime trying to meet all those people and still fail miserably. And yet the world is really a small place when you think about it. While there is still much more to be expolred on this planet there are untold reaches of space beyond us that dwarf this planet in comparison. Despite the large number of people you inevitably end up running into someone who knows someone else that you know from a completely different realm of life. This really is a small world after all.

Picture (Jun. 2)

I am sure you have heard the phrase, "A picture is worth a thousand words." This statement holds incredible validity on many different fronts. In comparing a word with a picture, there are many things to notice. Words exist within a particular realm where by there is a given defined shape to which a word can take. Then once the word is complete it has but one clearly defined meaning. A picture on the other hand may have a particular shape and may fit within a given realm but the freedom within that realm is something that words cannot come close to. A picture requires a great deal of interpretation both from the brain to determine what is in the picture but then to also interpret a meaning from what is observed by the brain. There is freedom in a picture to find a definition that is more suitable to the interpretation of the individual. There is certainly a time and a place for words, such as in a blog like this or in the many books and papers the have been written throughout the ages. Still the pictures with a single page can tell an entire story, something a book could only dream of. The precision of words is something that has its place but the simplicity or rather complexity of a picture does so much more with so much less.

Famous (Jun. 1)

The world in which we live today is absolutely enamoured with celebrities. Even more to the point, there are now things like YouTube which allows for ordinary average people to record something on camera and then turn it into something that the entire world can see allowing the average person to be famous, if only for a little while. On the one hand it makes perfect sense why we are so excited about those people who are famous simply from the standpoint that it seems everyone wants to gain some sort of fame in their lives. The desire itself may be traced back to the innate, and incredibly selfish desire, to be known by the rest of the world. If we can die and have more than just our family and friends know who we are and the great things that we have accomplished then we will have made a name for ourselves and we will be remembered. Because of course history only remembers those people who were truly great. In reality, outside of a select few people, everyone becomes forgotten at some point and fame only stretches so far. Fame also has some pretty severe affects on those who are living with it, simply by the way that people strive to know more and more about those who are famous. The knowledge one seeks to gain in knowing a celebrity must somehow relate to the fact that we have this desire to know how it might be possibly for ourselves to also become famous. Fame through selfishness has also ruined many celebrities as we can see from early drug use, other run ins with the law and most sadly the early death of many.

Sale (May 31)

It seems that store are very eager to get you to come inside and spend your money. Society tells you that you need to keep up with your firends and buy the latest and greatest things. And yet it seems that we find ourselves as a society less pleased than ever and in the midst of a recession that is only fuled by commercialism and the desire to have stuff. A sale is an easy way to make a dollar and stores often tell you how much money you are going to save because you bought something on sale. The reality is that a sale is an easy way to steal money from the unsuspecting. See, you will have more money in your pocket if you never buy the item on sale to begin with. There are many interesting tricks of the trade that also factor into the idea of a sale. See a product is made for a certain amount of product and labor. The item is then shipped to a distributor and then to the stores, each step along the way adding a bit of cost. Then the store puts a price on the item, usually around the manufacturers suggested retail price. This price is often inflated well above the total cost of the item. This way people will buy things where the store can make money as well. Then when things are not moving off the shelves the store can have a sale and that sale price is still above what the store actually paid to put the item ont he shelf. It makes no sense for a store to sell something below the price that they paid for it and they won't unless they do a large enough volume to have already recouped what they paid in the first place. The sale as you can see is all a trick based on the price that was paid by the store for the product.

Pay (May 30)

When one does a particular job they usually expect that they are going to get paid for their work. Sometimes that pay is good and much appreciated and sometimes it is that money that becomes dangerous. See the world we live in today does not value what they are paid and we have created several laws which theoretically make pay something fair. While these laws are not in and of themselves a bad thing it seems that they have put more moeny in the hands of people who honestly do not know how to use their money wisely. Since one's credit and ability to buy big things on credit is a result of how much they make, the reality is that people who are getting paid more than they potentially should are being told that they can afford things that in reality they cannot afford at all. One of the more interesting laws goes on to say that different people should be paid the same for equal work. The reality of what pay is, however, is that is it something to be agreed upon by employer and employee on an individual basis. I am reminded of a story where an employer needed help and hired a first group of people at an agreed upon pay. Later, realizing that he needed more people to complete the task on time, he hired more people and agreed with the second group of people to pay them the exact same amount of money that he agreed to with the first group. Still later there was a third group of people that he brought in and agreed to pay them the same amount of money for their work. At the end of the day when all the employees were paid and dismissed everyone, despite the differing amounts of time that they had worked were paid the money that they agreed to work for, the exact same amount for everyone in all three groups. Those in the first group complained and yet they had no arguement since they were paid what they originally agreed to. Be glad that you are paid for the word that you do and be sure to spend that money wisely.

Woods (May 29)

All the wood that we use to build things comes from trees that were once part of a forest. For those that spend time in the forest you will know that you have been back in the woods. Wood itself is a very interesting thing. It takes years and years to grow to a nice enough size to be cut down to use for something else. However, the wood itself, before it is cut down is something of a majestic nature. It is alive and grows. Very few places that can be considered woods are made up of thousands of trees that all coexist in harmony with one another. They become so think in spots that it might seem like one must be impeding on the other and yet it is not the case. They stand there, all nice and tall with their branches spread out as if to say look at me. Then, in the back woods, when the wind comes it is almost as if the trees begin to talk. They whisper things in your ear that you never thought you could hear and yet there it is. It isn't like they are saying go away or this is my space. It is something much greater than that, something of a welcoming nature that also says thank you for protecting me. When the woods are cut down the trees stop talking and something becomes amiss. The wise will take what they need and leave the rest, planting more to grow in place of what they have taken. Then the woods will talk forever.

Movies (May 28)

One of the greatest forms of art, and certainly the most appreciated form of art, in todays culture is that of movies. Sure you haven't really thought about movies as art before but when you think about how a movie is made on film in much the same way that a photographer takes a picture it is really hard to deny movies as art. While they are similar to something such as the theater only with a lack of live actors performing their artful skill, the movie is greater for many reasons. See the world in which we live has made the movies a cultural phenomenon whereby we will gladly spend $7 to $15 to see the latest movie on a regular basis. Movies have become much like television where you are not a part of the conversation unless you have seen the latest movie. Movies have also taken the idea of escapism to an extreme unmatched by any other art form or other form of entertainment. We have swaped out reading for the movies when it comes to taking ourselves to far off worlds and situations far beyond what we deal with in everyday life. We look at movies to tell us how to act and how to discover who we are and who we want to become. We use movies to pass the time and dream of what could be, either right now in our own lives or in the much distant time from now, past or present. No other art form has sought to maximize technology to create something truly unique where the experience if truly something that has never been done before yet feels so familiar. The power that movies have is also a very dangerous edge on which we will always walk as long as the population in which we live continues to go to the movies.