The Talmud tells this story (in Berachot 60b):

Rabbi Akiva was once going along the road and he came to a certain town and looked for lodgings. But everywhere he went, he was refused.

He sighed and said, “Whatever the All-Merciful does is for good.”

So because he couldn’t find a place to stay in the town, he traveled out of town, into an open field, and camped out there.

Dropping like a Feather

This morning, my bathroom scale read 184.0. That’s about a pound less than it did last week. Slightly disappointing, as my food journal (which I just began this week) seems to indicate that just cheating even a little causes me to put on the pounds. I get just a whiff of that birthday cake, and my body responds by adding a pound of fat. Ugh.

But 184 pounds is also a confirmed 4 pounds less than 2 weeks ago— So on average, 2 pounds per week. And that’s encouraging. At this rate, I’ll weigh 176 (which is almost “normal”) by Valentine’s Day (knock on wood), and hopefully looking a lot more sexay.

I don’t know what I’d do without Google. What did people do before Google? How did they do research? They actually went to a library and looked up stuff and copied it into thick binders full of paper.

That was less than 20 years ago, and I remember a bit from those times. But I was never very good at the research thing, not until Google showed up on the scene. My kids, they’ve never known a world without the Internet and without Google and without every bit of information they could ever want at their fingertips. To them, the library is the place you go to get a community Wifi connection.

And how many years will it be before Wifi hotspots are a thing of the past? We’ll all be on, all the time, connected to unlimited, low-cost, high-speed broadband from our wireless devices. That day may not be too far off.

I’m talking, of course, about the day when Star Trek becomes reality.

Reading back through some of the old posts on this blog, I see a man who saw wonderful possibilities for his future, and an undiminishable drive to pursue those possibilities; a man who saw the future as his salvation, not as his curse.

What happened to that man?

He’s still inside me, beat down by patterns I’ve allowed to set over the past 6 or 7 years. He may no longer be fighting, but he still longs to escape, to live free.

Enter the Used Book Superstore. Browsing there one day in the Psychology section, I of course noticed the wanna-be-psych-textbooks, the pop psychology, the psycho-mumbo-jumbo. And then a book jumped out at me—literally, almost jumped into my hands—a hardcover entitled The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here.

To sum up from yesterday, a friend of mine posted on Facebook the “texting while driving” video, which contains an extreme, violently graphic depiction of a severe (maybe fatal) auto accident. My friend posted this with only one comment, that it’s “a short video that speaks volumes.” Not a word of warning regarding its nature or content. And I frankly beg to differ regarding how well it “speaks” and what it says.

For the full experience, however, click here for part 1.

Instead, I’m going to talk about a personally traumatic experience. Because I was one of the people today subjected to the “texting while driving” video that’s been making the rounds.

I say “subjected to,” because I had not heard of it before, and I received absolutely no warning of its extreme, violently graphic content. So I am giving you fair warning, if you haven’t seen it. But I also want to talk about the dangers of watching videos like this, and about the alternative. Because I’m so emotionally keyed-up, I might say something I’ll regret later. But I think I need to express a unique insight on this video, as a writer and storyteller. I’ll also connect it to a repeated trauma that I was forced to experience when I was in elementary school.

This essay is long enough that I’m splitting it up over 2 days. I’m scheduling the second part to be published about 24 hours after this one. (That’s Wednesday at 8 PM.)

And I promise not to name names. (At least not real names.)

I’ve been updating my software-development résumé, trying some different things in hopes of finding a reasonably productive SD gig. Along the way, I think I may rub a few people wrong, but I think it’s for the best. Because it’s the only way I know to ultimately accomplish my goals.

There’s something about the truly great accomplishments in my life that sets them apart from all the others: they were preceded by devastatingly tough times. One such accomplishment, of course, was meeting my wife Margaret. Before that, I dated girls who were bound to cause me heartbreak; I pursued girls that were bound to make me miserable; when I did meet a nice girl who could make me happy, I was sure to sabotage it (or ignore her). I spent 10 years in heartache after heartache, depression after depression.

But as many times as I swore off girls forever, I continued to play the sucker for the next pretty face that came along. Why? Because there’s an instinctive drive, deep in the heart of a man, that compels him to love a woman. Time and again, that drive forced me on and kept me trying again and again, until I found something that worked.

When the answer finally came, it was so simple, I wondered why I hadn’t discovered it before.