To Be or Not to Be

 
Damaged people live among us. They deny, they lament, they scream, and think no one hears them. So they self-medicate, create grand illusions of fictive comfort, and when those fictions fail them, then finally, they descend into the abyss of helpless despair. 
When we hear our elders speak of "the good ol' days"-- we mustn't dismiss the significance of those simpler times. They matter, because all those hordes of damaged people would have been fine in 1952, but now, they have to deal with chaos and war and complications and the economy and drugs and challenge and an ever-increasing onslaught of the global village. 

I have often asked myself, is the world too much for me, or am I too much for the world? Years ago, and for a long time I thought the world was too much for me, but now I believe I'm too much for the world. And that doesn't make me better, it just makes me aware. And awareness leads to knowledge and knowledge leads to power, and with power, we can overcome. Halleluiah, and pass the guacamole.

Shakespeare wrote the now-infamous lines,

to be or not to be; that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them...

There are those in this world who are trapped in between the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the strength to resist and change their own outcome. That kind of strength is not something that comes to the meek. It comes only to those who can step away from their own pain long enough to see the possibilities, the beauty that can be had in this life. They are met again and again by cold reality, and their resistance to that truth ensures that they repeat the same behaviors. And in so doing, they ensure the same results, until all outcomes are predicated on a self fulfilling prophesy. This is how they sabotage themselves.

To Be or Not to Be