Women are certainly in the news these days. There appears to be a very good chance that we will have a woman President of the United States before long. The female half of the human race is certainly on the move. In honor of a changing world for women a certain meme is circulating on Facebook. It asks parents not to teach their daughters to long for the glass slipper but to develop a desire to break the glass ceiling. Unfortunately this line of thinking seems to insinuate an either or kind of world. Instead I see the opportunities for women as choices along a continuum. Hopefully we are free to choose exactly where we wish to reside.
I’m a hard charging competitive person. Most people don’t see that characteristic in me unless they get to know me very well. I don’t like to lose and I strive to be number one. It’s my nature to shoot for the stars and I often get there. In school I was told that I was not the intellectual equal of my honors class peers and so I set out to prove my detractors wrong. It wasn’t that difficult to demonstrate that I have the ability to hang with anyone. All it took was determination and lots of hard work. Nobody had to motivate me to be my best. It just came naturally to me. Continue reading “The Looking Glass”
I once drove through a neighborhood and spotted an obviously abandoned house whose walls were literally covered with a sprawling bougainvillea plant that had grown out of control. The blooms were a magnificent deep wine color and they were winding around the crumbling wooden structure in profusion. What should have been a dreary scene of a long neglected property was instead a glorious feast for the eyes. I’ve often thought about that lovely image and seen it as a kind of metaphor for life’s difficulties. It seems that the more stressed a bougainvillea vine becomes the more beautiful and hardy are its flowers. The bougainvillea is a determined survivor often flourishing in the harshest of environments.
I have a rather sassy granddaughter. She reminds me much more of my mother and mother-in-law than of myself or my daughters. I suppose that I secretly enjoy that she is so much more willing to assert herself than I ever was. I spent most of my childhood and teenage years being quiet and polite and even a bit repressed. I was truly afraid to be the person that I wanted to be or to express the opinions that rattled inside my brain. My granddaughter doesn’t even come close to being like that. 
Imagine how different your life would be if the world insisted on judging you forever based on who you were as a teenager or a young adult. What would it be like if after making a mistake here or a wrong choice there you were forced to conform to the fate resulting from your immaturity? For most of us it would be rather grim indeed. Few people manage to do the right things from the time that they become adolescents. Most of us have regrets and may even be a bit embarrassed by the way we once were. Luckily we are usually given second chances, even third or more, to redirect the trajectory of our lives. We learn from our mistakes, build on our experiences and become stronger and better persons over time. Sometimes though there will be people who want to shove us into a pigeonhole and refuse to see us any other way than how we were in our youth.
I suspect that some of my readers don’t always have a great deal of interest in reading about the unknown individuals about whom I often write but they should be craving essays about such people. Our world is made of millions upon millions of stories which in total keep life on our big blue planet working the way it should. It is a truth that each and every life is incredibly important and taken together they create the society that affects us all. I most enjoy knowing about the young men and women who are just beginning their adult journeys. Our future depends on them and from my vantage point I see a wonderful world ahead. We should all be quite optimistic knowing that they are taking the reins. 
All It Takes Is A Little Love 