Ye prized, Yet wretched…

“She was born for crowds. She has never come any closer to life than the dinner table” - Janet Flanner

There is nothing enduring in life for a woman except what she builds in a man's heart. And romance is the magic that turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. But love is infantile, though men believe more in love than death. Women are another story. They have a powerful secret. They don’t take love seriously and never have. Have you ever known someone, you know, so special, that you can’t let them slip away? I guess I'm attracted to these off beat people because my life has been a bit abnormal…

My life has been one big joke. I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think of it. I do not want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well. And to be able to look back upon one's past life with no regrets is to live twice. If I had to live my life again, I'd like to make the same mistakes, only sooner. Because you never know what life has in store for you, but you believe there are certain things one is meant to go through and one doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late. And half your mistakes in life arise from feeling where you ought to think and thinking where you ought to feel. By the time you hit thirty, you learn some hard lessons. You have found out that only a few things are really important. You have learned to take life seriously but never yourself. In fact, some of my worst mistakes have been haircuts!

We've all been raised by television to believe that one day we'd be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. We see the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. We see all this potential and we see this squandering. An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaving with white collars. Ads have us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy stuff we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. And we are afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of greatest courage, we enjoy and even thrill to the god-like possibilities we see in ourselves at such peak moments yet we somehow shiver with weakness, awe and fear before the same possibilities...

We spend our time trying to perfect ourselves, painting glossy pretty paper and paint over our inner layer, that we forget what we look like anymore, so pure and good inside of all of us, yet we spend all year papering over it and covering it, either because we're too busy, because our lives and our work are too hard or because we are too crushed by weltschmerz- the negative voice that perches on our shoulders and says that we’re frightened, scared or we can’t handle the situation and scoffs us, "You thought you were strong. Not so strong now, are you ? You’re not strong at all, you’re weak. You fold like a piece of paper. That’s all you are, a paperweight!"

Pain is life - the harder, the more evidence of life. But for some reason we blaspheme what we don’t understand. There is a crack in everything God has made. It’s very easy, to find the cracks. In others, and in ourselves. We’re pretty good at it. Often, we enjoy it in some perverse way. And if we point out the cracks in others perhaps we will forget the ones in ourselves. But the cracks in each of us, are, how the light gets in and to allow the light in to recognize the cracks in ourselves and others and to not retreat from them. God doesn’t ask us to succeed, He only asks that we try...

The brick walls are for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people. And some brick walls are made of flesh. Let’s talk of football here. My dream was to play in the super league. No, I did not make it but I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish. I had a coach, I signed up when I was twelve years old. I was the smallest kid in the team, by far. While he was six-foot-four, he had played linebacker back in college days. He was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school. And I mean really old school. Like he thought the forward pass was a trick play. And he showed up for practice the first day, and you know, there’s big hulking guy, we were all scared to death of him. And he hadn’t brought any footballs. How are we going to have practice without any footballs? And one of the other kids said, excuse me coach, but there’s no football. And coach said, right, how many men are on a football field at a time? Eleven on a team, twenty-two. Coach said, all right, and how many people are touching the football at any given time? One of them. And he said, right, so we’re going to work on what those other twenty-one guys are doing. And that’s a really good story because it’s all about fundamentals. To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death. You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing. He also said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothered about you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your real critics are telling you they still love you and care.

Find the best in everybody. That is one other thing I learnt, every man has his own priest, church and alter in him. You might have to wait a long time, sometimes years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out. If you want everyone to be on the same page, better sing from the same hymn sheet, put the page in front of them conveniently and often. In the end, we are left with our last muscle - the heart. And I want to live as if only love exists. For those who tuned in late, today is as good a time as any…