It is Sunday afternoon and I am sitting here listening to some beautiful music and I have a cat in my lap that is happy as long as I let her rest her head on one of my hands.  Of course, this makes typing somewhat difficult, but it’s a dance we do often if she wants a soft place to nap.

I recently began swimming, actually treading water, on a daily basis.  I did this to try to increase my mobility and, frankly, to make Jackie happy.  Honestly, I did it more to make Jackie happy than anything else.

How often do we make decisions because we think they will make someone else happy, meet someone else’s expectations, or so that somebody doesn’t get upset? If you are like me, human, it is more often than we like to admit to.

Big Tuesday has always been a reference for when candidates are trying to become their Party’s candidate for President of the United States. In the last year Big Tuesday showed us what we already thought we knew. We were going to have our first woman President.

“How cool is it that the same God who created Mountains & Oceans,& Galaxies, looked at you & thought the world needed One of You TOO!”

 I don’t know whose quote that is, but it certainly made me stop and smile. It also made me think about that concept for a while. Imagine a world where we all believed that God thought that the world needed each one of us. Imagine if we all believed that. Imagine that this same concept applies to every single molecule of creation as we know it.

"She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful for the way she thought. She was beautiful for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn't beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful deep down to her soul." F. Scott Fitzgerald

I saw this quote, and it drew me in. I wondered how many of us really look at each other. Do I even take the time, when I look people in the eye, to see who they are, how they are, or even gather them into my heart? We human beings are a strange people. Somehow we get into worrying so much about ourselves that we forgot that we came to be who we are by caring, communicating, meeting, playing, working, believing, and being with each other. Then, I look at the city, county, state, country, and world, and I think to myself, why am I surprised that peace seems all but impossible?