1461 days

48 months

4 years

As posted before, time is weird. Those amounts sometimes feel incredibly short and also feel like an eternity. Frame of mind really dictates.

Love. Honor. Laughter. Live. Respect. and a little bit of Guilt.

Words to live by, words to drive yourself nuts by. Such is the life of a somewhat enlightened mind … if John was a writer/poet:

Love – easy, just open your heart – quit the hate, every person is just looking to protect their family and love/trust their neighbor. Stop being an asshole. Legit: words to live by.

Honor – know where you came from, honor those ties and cherish those connections if you are still lucky enough to have them in real life. Squandering this will be something you regret forever. But don’t begrudge someone else’s experience, and honor, because it doesn’t look like yours.

Laughter – Life is too f*cking short. Find the humor in the pain, it can literally always be worse. Belly laugh your way through the little shit – and almost all you face will actually be little shit when you reflect. Getting yourself knotted up in the details just takes away quality time from the now. Life. Is. Too. Short.

Live – do the things. Get out there. Fuck it up. Apologize when wrong. Try again. Be relentless when you aren’t wrong. Be human. Be wordy. Give the hug. Be emotional. Be loud. Hold quiet space when needed. You can be multitudes of things all at the same time – there’s no rule book!!

Respect – don’t agree, but respect. Proverbially punching someone in the face gets you nothing but a bruised hand and an enemy.

Guilt – it’s ok to feel guilty about the things missed. It’s ok to feel sad. It’s ok to feel conflicted. It’s not ok to stop your life. It’s not ok to be stuck in the past. And it’s not ok to forget. What you’ve been through is PART of you – take it, embrace it, learn from it … then go help someone else move through it too.

We are all bigger than the sum of our parts.