All analogies break down eventually.
Analogies are like roads: you can stick with them, but eventually they end, or they will get too bumpy to be useful.
Roads also separate neighborhoods and countries, which eventually lead to them being markers of inequality and dissimilarity.
Which in turn are opposites of analogy.
Even analogies for analogy break down.
Some don’t care about you, whether you live or die.
They may not know you exist.
They may know you exist, but not know you enough to care.
They may know you exist, but hate your guts.
In their world, your life doesn’t matter.
Having someone matter to you means their existence has an impact on your life.
When does someone’s existence impact you? When you care about them.
How can you care about them? By getting to know them.
How do you get to know them? By spending time with them.
Time. The one currency you can’t get more of, and of which with every minute that passes you have less.
Giving your time to someone is the way to get to know them, and as a result caring about them. And if you care, their existence impact you, making them matter.
Lives matter when you give of yourself to them.
So reach out personally to someone whose life may not matter to some. Reach out personally to someone whose life may not matter to you – yet.
And maybe one day we’ll agree the measure of lives mattering is that they just…
do.
Every year we try to take a picture on Easter Sunday.
Decided to take some portraits today.
At the health club I attend, folks are constantly taking turns using the 20lb and 25lb weights. There are many sets of these, and they look worn out and sometimes broken. And yet, people keep fighting for them.
At the other end of the rack, you can find the heavy dumbbells. Those weigh between 80 to 150lb. There’s just one set of each weight. Yet nobody fights for those. They just sit there, waiting.
They are there waiting for the folks who train the hardest. Those people just walk in and grab the shiny weights, while the rest of us fight for the beat up ones.
I have found that life tends to be like that as well. The scarcest, shinier things tend to be available for the taking, only if you have worked hard enough to be in position to make use of them.
Keep working hard, keep getting better, keep working at excellence. Then stroll in and grab your shiny weights.
Almost done!
I have come to realize that giving up things for lent is not about suffering. It’s not even about sacrificing as an end on itself.
Instead, sacrifice is a means to an end.
All things worth pursuing require some level of sacrifice. Exercising sacrifice makes us better at becoming better.
So if you look at giving up things as an exercise of becoming better, the sacrifice becomes more palatable, and even exciting.
So try giving up something good for the sake of something better. You will yourself become better in the process.
