Questions & Answers

I’ve recently been put into a situation that has caused me to question how well acquainted I am with myself. I know what I do and I know how I do it, but what I don’t always seem to know is why I do it. And that is the question the leads us to the final answer, of “Who am I?”

Before you start speculating, I haven’t had a difficult moment in my life occur; I’ve just had the personal satisfaction of calling into question my knowledge of myself. The good news for me is that I’ve been given some time to reflect and now know more about myself.

I’m not a lot of things. But what I am makes up for all of that. I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a son, a brother, and grandson, and nephew, and much less commonly in my rapidly progressing age, a friend. But beyond that, I am a man. A man looking for answers to life’s great questions. And while I look at these questions, I turn up more questions than I do answers. And for a good part of my life, including most of the future if I know me, that is going to frustrate me. But at the end of the day, the questions are what are important. The questions are what make me feel alive. The questions are what keep life interesting. They are what keep us searching for greatness in life.

At the end of the day, I am a lot of things, but who I am is a student. A student of religion, philosophy, science, art, humanity, and life. And when curiosity runs out, the reason for being here runs out to. We don’t always need to have the answers, we just need to train ourselves to ask the right questions. And who I am is a man looking for questions.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Before anybody thinks I’ve gone crazy, the title of this blog is a grammatically correct sentence. It just takes a little understanding, a little time to work through, and a lot of patience to try and understand. First off, let’s start with part of the lesson, and then we’ll move on to the English class.

Sometimes, life can get a little muddled. The world itself seems to take a turn for what can best be described as a confused mess. It can be very “buffaloing” at times. And a lot of the time, we try to take the whole thing in at once, and only end up making things a whole lot worse. But to paraphrase an old saying “you can’t eat a buffalo in one bite.” You’ve got to take it all in stride. One step at a time, one moment at a time, one day at a time. You’ve got to make the best of it. By beating yourself down because life has beaten you down, you’ve made life extra miserable. To quote Harold Arlen “To commit suicide in Buffalo would be redundant.”

Now, to our English lesson. To understand the title of this blog, you have to understand the three different uses of the word “Buffalo”

Buffalo – A city in NY state (used as a noun adjunct for the purposes of this lesson)

Buffalo – An animal

Buffalo – a verb (To Buffalo) meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate

Now that we have all of the word defined, let’s start to put this sentence together.

Buffalo (city) buffalo (animal) Buffalo (city) buffalo (animal) buffalo (verb), buffalo (verb) Buffalo (city) buffalo (animal).

Still confused? Let’s add in some extra words and use some synonyms to help us clarify.

Buffalo-origin bison that other Buffalo-origin bison intimidate, intimidate Buffalo-origin bison.

See, that wasn’t that hard. When you take it one step at a time, think through things, and see things for what they are, they really do make a lot of sense. And you’re not any worse for wear having gone through it.

The Moment It Hits You

Sometimes in life, you have a moment, when it hits you. No matter what “it” is, there is always sometimes that moment when “it” just makes sense. There are times when life provides you with a moment of clarity, and it’s important that we are there waiting with open arms to draw it in and make it our own.

I've recently had one of these moments. It came on over the course of several months, and the information just sort of trickled in and sat in the back of my mind over time. Then, in a moment of stillness, a moment of silence, a moment of inspiration it hit me.

What “it” is in this situation doesn’t matter much. But what does matter is that we take the time to notice “it” when it happens, and we remain open-minded enough to embrace “it” for what it is.

Life has a way of working itself into the shape it wants to be, we just need to be able to accept it and make it into everything it can be.

Chase the Sun

Every morning the sun comes up, and we come up with it. It begins on one side of the world and moves across the sky, setting as far away from where it started as it can. As we go about our day, we rarely take a moment to notice the sun moving through the sky, taking it’s journey from one place to another. But maybe we should be focusing on it more than we do. There is a lesson in it’s routine that all of us benefit from.

At the beginning of any new day of our lives, we begin in one place and no matter what we do or how the world turns on, we ultimately end up where we were destined to end up anyway. The lesson we can take away from this very simple fact, is that while we may not always end up where we want, we will always be where we where our destiny was taking us.

“Chase the Sun” is a saying that goes around at times and is generally taken to mean to follow your dreams. Something I think we all need to take a moment to think about is that while following our dreams is important, we also need to take some time and let our dreams follow us to our destination. Whether our dreams get there first and we have to go and get them, or we get where we need to be and let our dreams come later, we will always end up where we need to be. And as the sun accepts it’s fate, so should we. Life will find a way, and we should hold on to our life as something that while not always as predictable as the movement of the sun, but it will always end up the way it is meant to.

In Between

In Between

“Who I am is in between what I want to be and what I am….”

There are times when we are all less than perfect. It’s a universal truth in fact, that nobody is perfect. Yet we all still strive to be that way. Why? A struggle to be perfect does nothing but frustrate us when we fail. This is the first part of my plea for the day. Give up on trying to be perfect. We aren’t perfect, we’re human. And quite honestly in my opinion humanity is a much better thing to celebrate than perfection will ever be. “To err is human.” And being human is something that we all have in common and we should take into account when making decisions.

That being said, there is a second part to my plea today, and that is to be better than you are. Nobody is perfect, true, but there is a latent power in all of us to be more than what we currently are. We can all suffer to make some improvements to our lives, even if they are just small ones. This is something that I bring up a lot and something that I hold very near and dear. We are all better than we give ourselves credit for, and we can make this world a better place if we embrace that and strive for the betterment of the world.

Two very conflicting points of though, but still both are very necessary observations that all of us can take to heart and grow from. No I will never be perfect, but I do have the abilities in me to make myself better than the man sitting here today. What steps will you take to make yourself in between perfection and who you are today?