The Hardest Thing

What is the hardest thing in life? Many would consider going to college, experiencing the death of a loved one, or having a child to be the hardest things. I disagree. You might experience those things in a different way when you go through them, but people can tell you how to get through those things. You might disagree with my opinion, but it’s called an opinion for a reason.

The hardest thing in life is learning to forgive.

Learning to put aside your feelings, your emotions, and your pride to reach peace. This cannot be taught. This cannot be explained. Wise people advise others to forgive, and we hear in church that we are supposed to forgive others and ourselves. Excuse the cliché, but that is easier said than done.

Everything we as humans are told to do is to strive to be better, make good moral decisions, achieve our ideas of success. Our society has become so headstrong about following through with our decisions. One of the most under taught and unused ideals in our society is forgiveness. When someone has an opposing view or is clearly wrong, what do you do? What have you done in the past? Agree to disagree? In your head you are still right and you are just avoiding conflict.

So much of today’s youth is raised thinking they are entitled to so much and they have an “I don’t care” attitude. Well it’s great that you don’t care. Just like the machine you use to post your thoughts on a feed, you too are becoming a machine. Heartless and uncaring. You learn to avoid. You make new friends. You graduate high school. You find another job. These are not relationships. You are simply deteriorating your own character.

So I say to anyone reading this. Have a heart. Solve a conflict when you otherwise wouldn’t. Forgive when it hurts most.

Lists

I make lists. I make a lot of lists. Short term, long term. Most I’ve written down, but some I still keep up with in my head. I use them to stay on track. To reach goals. So I don’t forget something or an assignment.

If you visit my house you’ll notice grocery lists in the kitchen, notepads lying on tables, and many sticky notes on my desk. Along with those I have lists stuffed in notebooks in the bookshelf above my desk. You should just see my Notes app on my phone.

And yet, I still can’t remember everything. I’ll walk into the other room about to call my mother asking her about a few things and I’ll forget one of the three things I was going to ask her. The phone call then would be pointless or end with me calling her back a few hours later when I remember what it was I had forgot.

I don’t suffer from short-term memory loss or even some might say I’m OCD about things, but I do like order in my life. I spend most of my time at home alone, so it seems natural that I have a constant sense of what I should be doing to avoid wasting time. But because I am alone, my thoughts are always racing. Racing from one topic to another. One idea to the next.

I have come to the conclusion that I keep lists to remember all the things my brain thinks of too fast. I simply think faster than I can keep up with.

Intro

Creating this blog is another attempt at defining myself as an individual. After many failed tries to document my life in appointments and overdue homework scribbled in some half used agenda, I decided that I need a place to write out my thoughts- everything that crosses my mind in hopefully a witty, likeable way. Plus, witting actual words on actual paper takes entirely too much time.

Many topics are crossing my mind right now. What do I want to blog to be like? Where do I even start after this somewhat meaningless entry? Is writing about details in my life even safe with all these cyber-predators roaming the internet as school lectures teach us? Oh well. I’d rather write for my own enjoyment and to look back on something down the road than write for the general public’s interest. Which, in my opinion, blogs need a lot more of these days.