Abortion Surgeon Presents his Case

The abortion issue is charged with emotion, and I find that emotion has a way of bending perspective. Excited people often see things with less than the objectivity possessed by the same people when they are more relaxed. That said, I think a fetus is much more than many people claim. And that opinion is not mitigated by the noteworthy video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZXQBhTszpU&feature=youtu.be. Take the 6 minutes needed to watch it.

Unawareness

You ever notice that things work best when we are not aware of them? For example, you don’t feel the best fitting clothing when you wear it. If something feels tight or abrasive, it isn’t functioning as it should. Another example: if you supervise workers, you’ll know that things are going best when you aren’t noticing any problems.  A house is functioning well when its occupants don’t notice problems: there is hot water, the roof is not leaking, and there is no vermin. Unawareness is what you want in so many situations in life. I have often said that a problem is only a problem when you think about it.

Unawareness isn’t always best though. Someone was telling me today about a gal that was evicted from her apartment for non-payment of rent. The authorities showed up and gave her until the end of that day. The police got involved to make it happen. The woman was surprised, probably not that it would happen, but that it would happen that day. I am sure she had lots of warning, but she closed her eyes to the problem. There are some problems that simply do not go away just because we don’t think about them. Yeah, they might not be problems in the moment, but by ignoring them --- by kicking the can down the road --- we allow the problems to get bigger and to gather momentum so that when the chickens finally do come home to roost, the situation is much more problematic than if it had been resolved early.

I like procrastinating doing what I do not enjoy. And guess what? I have found that sometimes procrastination pays off. I find that often what I delay doing, until it’s too late to do it, never really needed doing in the first place. Yet, procrastination is to be used cautiously.

Conative Beings

It seems to me that people have a hard time living in the moment. For the moment? No problem. But in the moment? That’s more elusive. We are always striving for something else. We are conative beings. Here’s what we do. We go to play school to get ready for kindergarten. Then we go to kindergarten to get ready for grade school. Each year of grade school is to enable us for what comes ahead, presumably university or technical/trade school. We go through those post-secondary schools to get ready for a J-O-B. The job is to enable us to reach retirement ---- the end goal? Well, we get to retirement and a lot of things are no longer working….we don’t have the energy we once did.

If you do not know how to live in the moment, you will always be struggling for something that you will not enjoy when it arrives. If you can’t enjoy the present, you won’t enjoy the future when it becomes the present. We need to learn that we always have enough right here and right now to be happy, and we need to notice what we have, be grateful for it, and enjoy it. That requires practice, and it requires a change in attitude.

The Slippery Slope of Life

I recently stumbled across a photograph taken of a group of singles from late teens to mid-20s, taken in the early 1970s. The photo was taken outside a hotel ballroom. It was at a formal dance. I knew all 8 of the people. One not so well as I’d like (me!). I used to have laughs with most of them. But I reflect now on the disposition of them. One became my employee for awhile and ultimately had what I think has been a successful marriage. Two others, standing together, eventually married each other, and he started a business and was my client for a time. He committed suicide several years later. Next to him is another who also committed suicide. That’s 25% of the group! Well, maybe the second guy didn’t kill himself, but he did overdose on sleeping pills, and the number taken didn’t seem accidental. Next to him is a brother of the gal that became the wife of the first suicide. That brother married a pretty girl and later left her and their children. The other two: I don’t know what happened with one, but the other had a fairly successful career and marriage so far as I can tell. Nice to end with a success story.

If that happy group could had had the future unveiled just before that picture was taken, the smiles I see there would surely have been forced or turned into frowns. Life is what happens when we are making other plans.