Back to the Future

In the day to day chaos that is our lives, it's amazing how just one change can effect our life so greatly. In this day and age, ripples aren't just for water, and domino effects don't just effect dominos. Everything seems to effect everything, no one thing can ever go unchanged. And maybe that's sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing, but it seems that, more often than not, it is the undecided changes that effect us more than anything.

If you could go back in time and change some of the decisions you made, would you do it? It seems that people have been asking themselves this question for so long that it's almost become a cliche. But cliche or not, its pertinence will continue to make it an everlasting question that puzzles so many, as they face the struggles and questions before them daily. If I hadn't left, would they have robbed the house? If I hadn't made that mistake, would we still be together? Would she still be alive?

For me, it's a question, not of life or death, loss or gain, but of love and pain. Would I have been ready if he'd shown up two years in the future? If I'd just stayed with my original choice, & not had the chance to watch the sparks fly that first day, would I be sitting here swallowed up by an emotional wave that I wasn't ready to face? And yet, if I hadn't met him that day, would I have ever met him?

When the scales are filled, the weights counted, and the answer is still unsure, the only thing I know is that I no longer know how to live without him. It is now a question of whether that will prove itself useful or harmful, and the answer is yet to be seen.

Summer Wind

As I stepped out onto the porch in the late evening hours, I took a long breath and let the sweet smell of the summer air pamper my senses. It had just rained, and the air felt fresh and calm, the breeze warm, and as it tugged at my sleeves I was whisked away to another time, lost in my thoughts for a brief refreshing moment. On any other day I might sit out on the porch and enjoy the sensation of renewal the rain washed over me, but today was not any other day. Today I had things to clean, to put together, to prepare. Today was a day for watching an old house become new- in its own right of course- and seeing a transformation long-awaited, and yet somehow feared.

It's funny, even the beat of our own hearts can change so quickly, and yet sometimes it happens so subtly that the change has come and passed before even we ourselves have any cognition of its arrival. Like the warm summer breeze and it can fly us away to something new and unexpected, then leave us thinking we had never moved, never changed.

But when a change of mind becomes a change of heart, and a change of heart becomes a motive for curiosity, it seems almost a question of logic to wonder whether the change was to our benefit. If change can be a powerful force for both, how can we tell which it will be, what the outcome will be?

If change is like the wind, and wind is everchanging, then perhaps it is in our better interests to stop wondering and start accepting, stop questioning and start acknowledging. Perhaps it is only when we accept the change that we can truly begin to understand it.

Stereotypes

Carbon monoxide is of the most deadly of gases- but not because of its potency, or even its compilation. Carbon monoxide can surround you and seep into your lungs before you even know it's there, and in minutes it's scentless and colorless essence will have sucked your life from your body, and you'll have died never knowing what hit you.

As I sat at the computer, here in the main room of my family's house, I heard my sister exclaim in surprise that there was a girl on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader that had answered all the questions correctly. Her surprise, however, came, not in that someone had gotten all the questions right, but in that a cheerleader had.

It's almost disturbing how much a part of everyday life stereotypes have become. And whether or not we beleive we succumb to this manner of thinking, the truth of the matter is, in some way or another, we all have. Stereotypes are all around us, in everything we see, hear, read. Every step we take, they swirl around us in their unseen toxicity, just waiting to choke out our prospective relationships- how could we not begin to believe them?

Of course, there's always a truth inside the lie- certain personality traits, disabilities, habits, even upbringing often influences people into certain circles or actions. And as we feel out our own self, search for the true person we will become, recognizing these is almost imperitive to finding our place in society, the niche where we as a person can be the happiest for ourselves and greatest help to others.

But when we set label to person, description to label, we stop looking for where to belong, stop searching for the better of people, and start putting up fences that block out the possibilities of individuality. Instead of seeing in the crowd the people we will get along with best, we stare out at a sea of cliques, each with an impersonal description set to the beat of a negative tune, and suddenly our list of potential friends is cut in half, and we don't even realize the harm we've just laid upon ourselves. Its amazing how something so simple and virtually undetectable can be the death of something so great and powerful as a friendship, sometimes even before it's had a chance to begin.

If we could learn how to block out stereotypes, to see each person for who they are as an idividual, and not as a label, would we have more friends, or just more respect for the people we've never really clicked with? And if stereotypes are so rampant and virtually undetectable, how can we unlearn what we've been programmed to think?

But then, maybe it's not so much a matter of erasing the old, as it is a matter of writing the new. Maybe, instead of labels,we need to learn personalities, reasons, mindsets. Maybe one day we can all see that people aren't labels, they're just people.

Vantage Altered

It seems it is simply in our human nature to avoid change at all costs, and when threatened with the change, it is often that we shut down and sink down inside ourselves, clinging desperately to the pieces of our past we want to keep. But what is it that makes us hate the change? Is it really our love of what we have, our fear of losing it, or is it a fear of something new that may not meet our expectations?

But whatever our reasons for shutting out the waves of change, the outcome is always the same, no matter how hard we try to keep it from happening, how much we try to stop ourselves from changing, the world around us will always go on changing, with or without us. The question is, when the change happens, will we be part of it?