"Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." - John Lennon
Truer words have never been spoken.
To recap, last night I arrive home from a long, busy day of being important to find Daughter watching a television program showcasing the all too familiar images of dust clouds and crumbling skyscrapers.
I proceed to unwind a bit prior to having the "Why Evil Exists In Our World" conversation and intend to fully cover the topic of what motivates foreign extremists to carry out brutal acts of violence against fellow mankind and field questions that I have no concrete answers to.
While I am fetching my slippers and tending to my pipe and smoking jacket, the nerve wracking sounds of domestic violence being committed between two siblings pierces my sound space.
This solemn evening of reflection has now been entirely compromised. I quickly shed my cozy slippers, exchange the smoking jacket and pipe with a striped referee shirt and whistle then proceed to approach the tempest with equal parts caution and fury.
To break it all down for you, a common annoyance of he said this and she did that snowballed into a moment of weakness which translated into a violent episode of brother pinching that ultimately caused the unnecessary loss of large quantities of saline from one child's eyes.
Could I have asked for a better segue way to discuss why avoidable violence occurs in our world?
If I could punish terrorist behavior by taking their mobile devices away or suspending their social media accounts for a week, I would do so in a heartbeat. But only if I thought that the reprimand might work better than it does on my own children. Which is to say, it does not.
In the end, both children were at fault, though neither quite saw it that way. One responded horribly to the adversity, which somehow made them a little more wrong than the other overall, but shared fault must be acknowledged for any progress to be made. It's easy to point fingers and overlook your own shortcomings.
If the events that took place twelve years and one day ago have taught us anything, it was how to find courage under fire. Standing back up after getting knocked to the ground takes a lot of courage as does fighting back. What takes even more courage is to judge your own conduct before you go pinching the enemy.
Side note specific to hand jazzing: I jazzed my hands today celebrating the use of a John Lennon quote which I've really wanted to work in for some time now. It seemed quite relevant since all he ever really wanted to do was give peace a chance...right up until the day he was shot and killed, that is.
Today's Jazz Hands were a microcosm.
Day two-hundred and fifty-five complete.
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