As Woody Allen Put It So Well...

"Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
--Woody Allen


Why is it that unspoken traditions hurt more to break than acknowledged ones?
Maybe it's because the other person involved in the tradition hasn't realized that it is one yet; that you know the other person hasn't been thinking about it; that the other person can let you down without ever knowing it; that the next day you have to go on acting like nothing is wrong. Maybe it's because the other person doesn't know how much it means to you or how you could never tell that other person, not because it's embarrassing or that you'd sound clingy, but because there are no words.
From here on out, I'd like not to make traditions. They will only be broken.
So now, whatever happens, happens.

Aisle 6

While inside the grocery store today, I watched as a woman pushed a shopping cart with three young children clinging on to her. Although she was about thirty, I could see lines of worry in her face. Their clothes were dirty and their cart was almost empty. They obviously weren't well off. One child wailed as her brother pinched her and the mother snapped at the little boy "You know better than that!". She obviously wasn't leading an easy life.
I wondered what was going on inside her head and it struck me how our minds must be like parallel universes. The things that I spend most of my days thinking about, have never crossed her mind and vice versa. The people who mean the world to me, she has never met.
I wish I could share that woman's pain, but then again, I wouldn't be able to stop there; there are probably millions of people in the world worse off than me, and as much as I want to, I wouldn't be able to share with everyone.
There's nothing worse than watching somebody else suffer.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

It must have been months ago, by now, that I saw commercial that immediately woke me from my mindless trance of television-watching. It was a commercial for some sort of over-the-counter painkiller, the specifics are now vague but I remember clearly, at the end of the commercial, a very generic-sounding man's voice saying "Taking you a step closer to a pain-free world."
Now that had to be the most horrifying thing I'd ever heard in my life, I thought to myself. A world without pain?
At first it might sound good to you; no suffering, jealousy, anger, hate or fear. But as you take a closer look, you see that world would be lacking the things that only exist with pain, beautiful things, like hope and love.
It made me wonder if the world might be like that someday, and if so, how soon? Certainly not in this lifetime, but maybe in the next?
We learn from pain. Given the choice, I'd choose to take a step back instead.

Made, Kept, Broken

Promises are rarely made for the right reasons. Too many promises are made with no intention of being kept; sometimes for selfish reasons or sometimes in order to keep a person safe. I even admit to have made those kind of promises. I used to think that promises all depended on who they involved, that promises made to certain people were more valuable, more valid than others. Later on, I've realized how wrong I was. It took getting my heart broken (there are many, many different types of heartbreak and this was one of the less common, I think) to realize the importance of all promises and that it's possible for promises to be broken for good reasons, though they're broken all the same.
And although a broken promise almost lost me three of my best friends, I've recently made a promise that has changed my life forever, one that no matter what, I could never break. I even go as far as saying it has saved my life. And I'm grateful.

The Bus Ride Home

Whatever you may think, I've never been one for giving in to the ways things should be. I can sit comfortably in a corner alone, something usually frowned upon in today's society, and just let my mind wander for hours. I don't try to control where and where not my mind might take me, as do most people. Maybe they don't do it on a conscious level, but they do. They avoid the suffering, pain, anger, jealousy and fear by pushing it to the back of their minds, where it stays forever disguised as a different emotion. I've learned that such things never go away unless confronted. At such a young age, sometimes it seems like there's too much pain and and suffering in my mind that others don't experience. Or maybe they just haven't excepted it's presence yet?
Just this afternoon, as I let myself unwind after a long day, my mind brought me to a painful place. It was there that I realized that slowly, I'm turning into the person I'd most hate to be. It's little things mostly, similar aspirations, a new interest in a band or just the use of an expression, that I've realized are practically identical to their own. It's a scary thought for me to just maybe, be turning out like this other person and telling myself that I am my own, unique person hasn't helped. I'm almost under a spell where i don't realize the hypocrisy of it all, and the irony; when i finally come to a better place in my life, I start sliding down again into what I've just escaped. But I've now admitted to and confronted my fear and like so many times before this, it will soon start to fade.