In all of human experience, more words have probably been devoted to "Love" than any other emotion. It's certainly the subject for much of the world's art, music, and poetry, but what is it? Why is it so easy for some to love and it eludes others? I think there are many misconceptions about what love is...and what it is not.
         I firmly believe the capacity for love is a learned behavior that begins in the cradle. Children who grow up through the first phases of their lives without a caring nurturing touch develop serious mental and emotional disorders, and developmental physical challenges as well. Sometimes children die from a lack of touch and affection, even though every other physical need is provided for. The earlier in the developmental process a child's needs are ignored or abandoned, the greater the trauma and stress and mental issues later.
Some issues become permanent.
         Why as lovers, do we sometimes do and say the most hurtful things to the very people we profess to love? If love is an emotion, how can we feel such jealousy and rage towards our lover when they don't act think and feel the way we want or expect them to?
          Falling in love is a fantastic experience. When we see our beloved, adrenalin is released into our bloodstream, as well as a delightful cocktail of endorphins, oxytocin, and hormones that help bind us to our lover and form an intense emotional bond, ego boundaries fall away and we feel as if we are "at one" with our lover. Orgasm releases a great deal of these bonding chemicals into our bloodstream as well.Falling in love feels good for a reason. If the relationship goes on long enough however, this initial stage passes, our ego boundaries snap back into place, and we realize that he or she is an individual with bad breath, the propensity to leave socks on the floor, and sometimes gets in foul moods. The bloom is over and the blossom always fades. Sadly, those who equate love with this initial stage of falling in love seek to re-create it, and when that fails, jump from lover to lover hoping that this will be "the one".
            That isn't to say that we stop loving the person, because this stage sets the conditions in which true love can actually happen. In fact, this first stage must pass if we are to get to what I believe is real love in every sense of the word.
            Once we exit the stage of seeing our loved one as "perfect" then we can begin to see them more as they actually are. They say when we hook up with someone in a relationship, we're getting three people.
The person they are, the person we THINK they are, and the person they will become as a result of being with us. The real power and the work of love is learning to see and accept the other person as they actually are, and our capacity for loving another is firmly rooted in our capacity to love and accept ourselves. Indeed, it is impossible to truly love someone fully while loathing and despising ourselves. Since nobody fully loves or despises themselves in the normal range of health, the meaning of love then, is in the daily journey from one end of the spectrum to the other. The trust and bonding that comes from exposing what we cannot love in ourselves to another and watching the anger shame and hurt dissolve in the light of day and the warm embrace of acceptance, is truly one of the most beautiful expressions in human experience. That is what I believe the journey of love is about. Love truly does set us free.          
             

Limits

I love quotes. Apparently, I'm not the only one because quotes find themselves on calenders, websites, and starting off speeches. I think a great quote can give us a window into a mindset, or a viewpoint that I hadn't considered before. Sometimes they're not all great ones, even though they sound positive. Here's one I saw the other day:

"When you put limits on your life in one area, it seeps into all other areas of your life. There are no limits."

-Bruce Lee

Sounds great doesn't it? The whole "no limits" thing certainly isn't a Bruce Lee brand original concept, but is it true? Not really. I can't jump off a cliff and fly to the moon, no matter how much I think about it positively. I'll never be able to lift a Buick and toss it over a wall no matter how much I go to the gym. Even Bruce Lee found out there are limits on how much iron a man can ingest before it kills him. 

The truth is that there are limits to what we can do, but many times we imagine the limits are much lower than they actually are, or fail to see that we have many more options available to us than we actually have because of fears, ignorance, or just plain laziness. Frankly, some goals are just not worth our limited time and energy, and that's okay too. The key is to focus on what we really want, see our limitations clearly, and work around them. I like this quote better.

 

"A man's gotta know his limitations"

-The Stranger (played by Clint Eastwood)

Fistful of Dollars.

Yeah, I know he said it later in one of the Dirty Harry movies, but he was paying homage to that movie when he said it. Most things have limitations. Including this post.     

What Hitler Taught Us

“As soon as by one's own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one's own right is laid.”

Adolf Hitler

         Why quote Hitler? Wasn’t he insanely evil? Certainly. Wasn’t he an idiot? Hardly. He nearly took over the world, and idiots don’t go in the history books. Actually Hitler was a genius at manipulating masses of people into thinking what he wanted them to think. He played on the German people’s fears and vanity like a grand piano.

       You might think.. “That was Germany in the 40’s” We’re smarter than that now.  Are we?  Listen to how today’s terrorism is characterized in the media and by our most powerful men- “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” “They hate us because we’re free..” Today’s politicians certainly learned a few things from Adolph Hitler.

       Did you know the United States has been in the middle east bombing them for over 10 years? We’ve been over there occupying their land, trampling on what they consider holy ground, and in the process, killing innocent civilians. They don’t “hate us because we’re free” as we’ve been told. They hate us because when a man’s son dies from one of our bombs, the other joins a terrorist group to try to get us out of there. How would we feel if some country had troops on our soil, killing our families? I hear it said that listening, even briefly, to our enemies is dangerous. Do you know what I find dangerous to believe in this day and age? That our politicians have our best interests at heart. To continue to trust a government that has demonstrated nothing but greed, corruption, and views that get sold to the highest bidder. To continue believing any words of an entire class of people who say one thing, then do another.

             This is not the America I learned about in school. Look around at the TSA pat-downs, the banishment of unpopular views, the manipulation of the press through consolidation of ownership. Is this the America so many have died to protect?

Jason Shaw

Some television shows go on too long. They do as much as they can with the characters and tell all the stories that are possible to tell. Then the audience begins to lose interest and fall away. Remember Happy Days? They did an episode where Fonzi went water skiing (in his iconic leather jacket) and ended up jumping over a shark. They say that was the moment when the sit com had run out of ideas. So the phrase, "Jumped the Shark" is an eloquent way to say  past your prime.

The year is almost over and this is usually a time when we reflect on the past, and hope for the future. Some people are concerned that the world is going to end in 2012. I'm not really that concerned about it. Nothing you can do about it anyway. Maybe it is time for the world to end. We've lost all compassion for each other, the rich have screwed things up for the rest of us with their insatiable greed and lust for power. Maybe, as a civilization we jumped the shark. I think it happened with Motley Crue's first album. 

Who invented the automobile? Who invented the light bulb? If you're a typical person you might say, "Well any fifth grader knows that!" Henry Ford invented the automobile. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Unfortunately, reality rarely comes in such neat packages. Henry Ford does indeed get the credit for the automobile, but you may be surprised to learn that he had no hand whatsoever in it's invention.
          Horseless carriages were available to the wealthy and hand made by German builders for many years. Henry Ford toured Europe and saw clothing being made cheaply on assembly lines, each person adding a bit to the finished product before being passed along for the next part. Ford saw that if he could apply this principle to building automobiles, everyone in the world could have one. This was exactly what Henry Ford did. He gathered the most brilliant engineers he could find and set out to mass produce cars. They told him that the heavy iron engine block could not be mass produced. He told them, "You'll find a way to do it within six months, or you're FIRED!!" They had it done in five.
          This is not to belittle Ford's contribution to the world, he made cars affordable to the masses, which is why the world paid him handsomely for bringing his vision to fruition.
          The story is similar for Thomas Edison's light bulb. Edison is thought of as a great inventor, but few of his inventions, save for the phonograph, and a few others were created single-handed. No, Edison's greatest invention was Menlo Park, where he gathered, and funded the most innovative inventors and engineers he could find. It was this team that conducted the famous 10,000 failed experiments before hitting on the electric light bulb. Bill Gates was a mediocre programmer, and Steve Jobs knew little about electrical engineering or electronics. But these men who changed the world as we know it, had the vision to combine seemingly disparate fields together and bring the world a new synthesis of old things.             

Has it all been done before?

Have you ever thought of something and wondered if anyone has ever thought of it before? The next time you think you've come up with something original, just Google it, and you'll see in an instant. The reason I call this blog what I do is that I just gave up trying. Is this the only thing in the world called, "The Daily Shizz"? Turns out the answer is "no". I found out after I entered this name that there's a sports site with that name. There's another blog by that name, that some 15 year old girl has, but hasn't updated since February.
       Maybe it ALL has been done before. 

Keep It Simple Stupid

You've heard the old adage, "Keep IT Simple Stupid".  In my own life, I'm always trying to simplify things like my finances, my daily routine, my jumble of internet bookmarks.  I guess the reason keeping things simple is because life is so...well,  not simple.  So many people want things to be simple that it's easy to reach for easy explanations and quick fixes.

Unfortunately, when we look at politics, social issues, economics, the reality is that most things are far from simple. Most social issues have a complex array of people involved, all with varying agendas, motivations, levels of understanding and capacity. Yet, many times when we hear the pundits and politicians, they lay out the problem in such two dimensional terms. "The problem is the plaid people don't get it and they don't want to pay money..." There. The problem is neatly summed up for a sound bite, but short on clarity.

Simplistic thinking may be one of the major plagues of our society. I listen to the news and hear the words, "The right doesn't get is "X" .....what the left doesn't understand is "X".   So we have Democrats on one side and Republicans on the other. I ask this: aren't there issues that have more than two sides?  Have you ever been mad as hell at someone you loved? Aren't there thousands of pieces to the average automobile that are necessary for it to run?


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