Making A Promise To Be Broken.

Hey look, I can be contradictory too. Who would make a promise to be broken? That they don't really mean to keep? Well, we all do, for one, but at least for some of us, we mean to keep it, but we subconsciously know that we never will. For others, they never even mean to keep it.

It's kind of like that latter one. I am absolutely, positively sure that I will not keep this promise. But I'm as equally sure that I will continue to make this promise every time I break it. So, in a way, I am keeping the promise. But I'm going to have to be re-affirming it a lot. Annoying, but sacrifices must be made, I suppose.

We all do that third option too, the one I just described. "I'm going to be nicer to people." Um, sure, for the 30 minutes you remember that you made that promise, and then you're only doing it so you don't seem like an asshole to yourself. You're not being nicer just to be nicer. So, I pose this question. Are you really being nice if you're not doing it out of the kindness of your soul? I guess, you might be. Being nice is just being nice, and if you force yourself to do it, against your own will, maybe that's being nicer then if you enjoy it.

But this was supposed to be about me. The promise I'm making, that I am sure will be broken and then re-affirmed, then broken, and so on until I die, hopefully making at least some progress. Progress is all we can ask for...Again, I digress. Can't help it. And I don't have the heart to hit the backspace button on such a little life gem like that.

I decided, yesterday, that I would try to be a little more like Morrie. Not completely like him, of course, because hey, I disagreed with some of his things. But I think it's reasonable that we should all be more forgiving, and less ashamed. And maybe, one day this week, I'll wake up, pretend there's a little bird on my shoulder, ask it if I'm going to die, and feel like I'm a great big fool. But then maybe I'll do it two times a week next month. Maybe it'll help.

But I'll probably forget about that promise too. Until I remember, and make the promise again, do it for a little awhile, and maybe, learn to be a touch more forgiving, a touch less ashamed, over the period of however many years until I die. Inch by inch and foot by foot. I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome To The Monkeyhouse and in one of the stories, a character asks "How did we get here?" the other one replies "One foot in front of the other, through the leaves and over the bridges." Nobody thinks about that, how every journey is composed of thousands of little steps. That's all a journey is. A thousand little steps.