A wise man once said you can have anything in life...

If you sacrifice everything else for it.

What he meant is nothing comes without a price.

So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose.

Too often, going after what feels good, means letting go of what is right.

And letting someone in, means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building.

Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming.

When we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss.

When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice turns out to be more than we can bear.

We all go through life like "bulls in a china shop" - 

a chip here, a crack there,

doing damage to ourselves,...  to other people.

The problem is trying to figure out how to control the damage we’ve done, or that’s been done to us.

Sometimes the damage catches us by surprise.

Sometimes we think we can fix the damage.

And sometimes the damage is something we can’t see.

I can feel damage all around me.

Human Beings need a lot of things to feel alive.

Family.

Love.

Sex.

But we only need one thing

to actually be alive.

We need a beating heart.

When our heart is threatened,

we respond in one of two ways

We either run

or

we attack.

There’s a scientific term for this...

Fight or flight.

It’s instinct.

We can‘t control it...

or can we?

life...

What’s worse?

New wounds which are so horribly painful

Or old wounds that should have healed years ago and never did.

Maybe our old wounds teach us something

They remind us where we’ve been and what we’ve overcome
they teach us lessons about what to avoid in the future

That’s what we'd like to think...

But that’s not the way it is, is it.

Some things we just have to learn over and over and over again.

We have to learn our own lessons.

We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug,

Until we can’t anymore,

Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin meant.

That knowing is better than wondering.

That waking is better than sleeping.

And even the biggest failure, even the worst most intractable mistake,

Beats the hell out of trying.

changes

There are a lot of things that can take over your brain when you fantasize. 

Lately, my fantasies are pretty simple. 

Most of the time, they lie in safety and stability.

But every now and then some other kind of fantasy slips in.

Most of our fantasies dissolve when we awake, banished to the back of our mind.

But sometimes we’re sure, if we try hard enough, we can live the dream.

The fantasy is simple; the pleasure is good.

And twice as much pleasure is better.

That pain is bad, and no pain is better.

But the reality is different.

The reality is that pain is there to tell us something.

And there’s only so much pleasure we can take without getting a stomach ache.

Maybe some fantasies are only supposed to live in our dreams.

Too often the thing you want most is the thing you can’t have.

Desire leaves us heartbroken

It wears us out...

Desire can wreak havoc on your life.

But as tough as wanting something can be, 

the people who suffer the most are those who don’t know what they want.

I think I know what I want.

So why am I suffering?

We either adapt to change,

Or we get left behind.

Heres the truth,

The more things change,the more they stay the same.

Oh…. Sometimes change is good.

Sometimes change is everything.

Grown-ups

After careful consideration and many sleepless nights,

I've decided that there’s no such thing as a grown up.
We move on, we move out, we move away from our families and form our own.

But the basic insecurities, the basic fears 

and all those old wounds just grow up with us.

And just when we think that life and circumstance have forced us truly, 

once and for all to become an adult, 

your mother says something like…

"Put on a hat! Dry your hair! You'll catch your death!"
We get bigger, we get taller, we get older,

But for the most part we’re still a bunch of kids, 

running around the playground trying desperately to fit in.

I’ve heard that it’s possible to grow up

I’ve just never met anyone who’s actually done it.

Without parents to defy we break the rules that we make for ourselves.

We throw tantrums when things don’t go our way.

We whisper secrets with our best friends in the dark.

We look for comfort where we can find it.

And we hope against logic, against all experience,

to finally get there.

Like children, we never give up hope.

It's a hard life - 

so instead of wishing for what we think will make us happy,

that career, that relationship, that money, that new car...

why not just love what we've got in this moment?

You know how when you were a little kid and you believed in fairy tales

That fantasy of what your life would be

White dress

Prince Charming who’d carry you away to a castle on the hill

You’d lie in bed at night and close your eyes and you had complete and utter faith

Santa Claus

Tooth Fairy

Prince Charming

They were so close you could taste them

But eventually, you grow up

One day, you open your eyes and the fairy tale disappears

most people turn to the things and people they can trust.

But the thing is...

it’s hard to let go of that fairy tale entirely

cause almost everyone still has that smallest bit of hope, of faith

that one day they’ll open their eyes and it will all come true.

And once in a while, people may even take your breath away.

meredith...

An early bird catches the worm.

A stitch in time saves nine.

He who hesitates is lost.

We can’t pretend we haven’t been told.

We’ve all heard the proverbs

Heard the philosophers,

Heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time,

Heard the damn poets telling us to seize the day.

Still, sometimes, we have to see for ourselves.

We have to make our mistakes.

We have to learn our own lessons.

We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug,

Until we can’t anymore,

Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin meant.

That knowing is better than wondering.

That waking is better than sleeping.

And even the biggest failure, even the worst most intractable mistake,

Beats the hell out of trying.
Maybe we like the pain…

Maybe we’re wired that way.

Because without it, I don’t know.

Maybe we just wouldn’t feel real.

What’s that saying,…

"Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer?"

Because it feels so good when I stop.