Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
Some people look at this car and say, “Nice car.” Or they say, “Great color.” It’s how we can respond to life in the positive. Others immediately look for a scratch, or prefer another model, or hate the color, or in some other way reject, deny, see the negative, or find fault automatically, because they are reactive by nature. There are any number of reasons why they might do that; all we know is that they are the bearers of bad news. People who do this often enough are themselves bad news.
Some people find the good in things, and can enjoy and be supportive. Others are negative and find the faults and create a line of constant bad news. Which of these two types of people do you want to show your heart to? Which are you more likely to trust? Which one will you share your inner dreams or thoughts with and hope that he or she will be supportive of your new creative concepts or innovative ideas?
Some people are so jealous or critical or shut down or angry or frustrated or otherwise geared to react in a certain way that they cannot imagine not seeing the most difficult side, the flaws, the scratches, the imperfections, the incomplete side, the wear and tear and mortality of it all. These people seem to be waiting for the end of the world, for death to finally take them so they can stop obsessing over it. You wonder if you or anything you do would ever be enough or be good enough for them. Why can’t they look for the good? It is true that eventually everything will go the way of the dodo bird, max out, fall apart, need repairs, need new paint.
Then they can finally be right and will be able to say, “I told you so.” It is easy to be on the predictive side when you say something can go wrong. You can start out every sentence with, “I’m just afraid that……” And the truth is that if you make 100,000,000 predictions you are bound to be right on some of them. It is inevitable. So, to react is to hang your hopes on the negative and lean the way of destruction and to support the lack, the flaw, the insecurity, the not-going-to-make-it side, and then to hope for failure in order to be vindicated.
Imagine your whole life staring at this car and thinking, “Someday the tires are going to simply rot off the wheels, and then this car will not even be able to roll.” And now again imagine driving this bad boy and having the time of your life driving through Montana on an open road.
You may think you have every excuse in the world why things will not work out, and, honestly, many of them won’t. But the things we have, the technology, the ideas, the venues of entertainment, the craftsmanship of daily life, and the monuments of human achievement were all made by people who responded to the flow of life within them and they got beyond the potential failures of living in a world with those who react every day in the face of their attempts to make a world that has incredible machines, enriched possibilities, and towering achievements, in spite of being told, “Noah, it will never float.”
I asked a friend of mine about his teaching PE but not being that fit himself. He said that, yes, he was teaching PE but there was little practical use of working out since when you stop it all turns to fat anyways. He thought that was a joke. He died of a heart attack at 38. Maybe he would have lived longer and maybe not. Maybe he would have died sooner, who knows? People always point to Jim Fixx, the fitness craze granddaddy in running…who died at 40, and then they say that running killed him. Maybe….or maybe Cobain, and Morrison, and Hendrix and Joplin might have died much earlier if they had not had music to keep them going. If you think that music killed them, then stop listening. If you think that working out killed Fixx, then sit down and wait awhile.
All I know is that if I had that car in my driveway, you and I would not be having this discussion right now, and you could kiss my scratched bumper.
runningturtle87
