being a blog about inspiration, sea glass focuses on stories and anecdotes from my life that i hope people can relate to. the juggling act. beauty. moments of epiphany. but recently i got a comment of a different flavor from a friend that inspired this post:
“what pisses you off?”
it made me smile when the note came through. if you’ve read a few posts, you might be tempted to believe that it’s all rainbows and unicorns for me. that i flit about sniffing flowers and shooting photos of fluffy puppies while, in many ways, the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
it reminded me of this classic clip from the jack nicholson movie, “as good as it gets”:
i wonder sometimes if i am like the woman, knocking on the door with some trite saying like "it was meant to be" or "the world is such a wonderful place"…
though i do generally believe that the glass is half full, let's be clear. i’m far from an idealist. there’s a lot that is busted in the world. i started to rattle off the rants in my head: greedy bastards effing up our economy, psycho tea baggers spewing hate, assholes rising to the top while hard-working people struggle to get through…”
as i was running through the list, i had a strange feeling of déjà vu. i dove back into the sea glass archives and looked at my very first post. here’s what it said:
2009 was a rough year. from january thru december, i felt inundated by bad news. at the macro level, i was disgusted by the modern day robber barons pillaging our economy. hearing about how virtually every industry—from banking to healthcare to our food system—was rife with corruption, mismanagement, corporate greed and public deception. on the personal front, diagnoses of cancer for family members and close friends, job losses, financial woes, construction problems with our home, and the loss of a twin that i carried for 27 weeks, were the flavors du jour. the morbid headlines and personal tragedies left me with an overwhelming feeling: futility.
not exactly butterflies and lollipops…and here we are more than a year later and many of the warts persist…and always will. greed, illness, unfair BS that doesn’t make sense.
we don’t live in a technicolor, stepford world where things are perfect and good prevails.
but i still believe that what we do have is moments and people that remind us that it’s not all bad. that we can be better. as jack's character proves, even the most jaded of cynics can see the light.
so it’s full circle back to that original post: there's a lot that is ugly, but far more, in everyday life is beautiful. inspired even. you just have to open your eyes to it.