The Grasshopper arrived with yesterday’s blizzard and dumped this on me:

“It may never be the way you want, but it will always be the way it is.”

It’s feels good to get what I want. The trap is to believe that having what I want is a permanent situation. What we want will eventually dissolve or evolve because permanence is not a reality of human existence, except for, maybe, death and taxes.

The message is to enjoy what you want while it’s here instead of attempting to capture and preserve it in a jar.

This isn’t fatalism; it’s realism.

In case you haven’t noticed, things will not always go your way. This is especially true when what you want is for other people to be the way you want rather than the way they are.

Reminds me of a story from my radio broadcasting days. I had a great teacher. His name was Paul Hennings. He operated a school for budding broadcasters in Norfolk, Virginia. Paul was a successful radio personality in the area and had quite an impressive background. He was the guy who, back in the day, replaced Arthur Godfrey (the father of the modern day disk-jockey) when Godfrey went from radio to TV.

Hennings told the story of his first couple of shaky shows after replacing Godfrey. His program director noticed that he wasn’t quite at ease and sounded stilted. After a bit of conversation, the program director said, “I hired you to be who you are, not who you think you have to be.”

People are going to be who they are regardless of us wanting them to be different. The amount of fretting you do because others are not like you or the way you want them to be only causes mental and physical distress and keeps you living in the land of illusion.

Here’s a reality based formula that will let the air out of an illusion:

If you can’t change what is, there are two options:

1. Accept it.

2. Walk away from it.

This is my hope for you and me: That we get more of what we want without being in a constant state of wanting.

All the best,

John