Roll The Dice

To say that life is a gamble may be the understatement of the century. At my job we have a truck driver that as a child was struck by tragedy in his early life, a plane crashed into an inferno next to his home at Tinker Air Force Base in Midwest City Oklahoma and he was badly burned. Now fast forward some sixty years and he is fighting cancer. Where is the justice? It seems that hate, discontent, and tragedy should be shared equally with all of us, not just rained down on a chosen few. I often wonder, will those folks that have met with so much misfortune in this life be blessed in the hereafter? That's a question in which I have no answer, but I hope the answer is yes.

Life can be measured in percentages; 33% is our experiences, 33% is how we perceive those experiences, 33% are the people that most affect our childhood and we consider major influences in our lives, and the last 1% is just a crap shoot. Because of our experiences (good or bad) we tend to run on the fuel of those memories and at times we are running on nothing more than fumes. Have you ever heard the saying "what you see here you don't see a lot, but you tend to see a lot of it?" That's just a countrified way of saying that the status quo usually rules and that reality is everything. The experiences of life are sometimes not in line with the lives we wished we could have led. For instance, one of my best pals from high school had a father who had a constant bout with the bottle. In turn, so has he. It runs in his genes so that's unfortunate. He also finished college, possibly because his mother told him he should and now he cannot seem to find work in his chosen field. In this way one might say that his parental guidance lead him astray even though their intensions were good. My parents however (be that planned or unplanned) left me to my own devices and everything has turned out fine. That is to say that they had their tongue planted firmly in their cheek when I said I wanted to go to welding school. That put me in the 1% of folks who are never lacking for work, but who knew? A warning to any parents whose kids have decided to choose this as way to make money in life, it's full to the brim with the dregs of society and your kids will have to become very adept at stepping around land mines to keep from being one of them. No doubt there have been a few bumps in the road, and I have inhaled a lot of crap in my life others haven't, but oh well. Something is going to get all of us eventually, none of us are getting out of here alive. Asbestos fumes may be deadly but at least they are low in fat. Can I get an Amen?

But the number one thing that can turn any life that has taken a strange twist into the bizarre is something I refer to as gratitude; I learned it from granny. It's a thought process that dictates no matter how many twists and curves there are in the road life, in our minds it is always freshly grated. I watched grandma lose her husband when they were both in their early 50, he had cancer. I watched her hit her knees and talk to God; did she complain? No, not even once. She merely thanked the good lord for what she was still blessed with, picked up those feed buckets because there were hungry calves that needed to be fed and carried on. Did she miss grandpa? Of course she did, but she never let it stop her from living the life she was blessed with. She never let her personal tragedy keep her from fulfilling her own destiny. The moral of the story is this; when we feel like balling up in a corner and giving up on life, we should focus not on what is, but what is to come.