Tag Archives: life

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Why I’m Bad At Promises – An Almost Incomplete Thought

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I’m really bad at promises. Here’s why: I forget the whole reason of a promise.

The tough thing about promises is they aren’t contracts. You don’t sit down with the person you are promising and decide on all the terms and conditions and then sign it.

And so I make a promise, and I go around and tell other people, and I get all excited that other people think that I’m keeping a promise. Yada yada yada.

During that time, I manipulate the conditions of the promise, and I think I am keeping the same terms, but I’m not because I’m not consulting the other person involved.

The tough thing about all of that is then the promise is worthless. If you have changed something that the originator of the promise wouldn’t agree with, then it’s worthless.

How do you keep promises?

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Dreaming of a One-Person Nonprofit

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I work for an organization that supports and aides nonprofits in the area. It’s a great job, and I get to be introduced to a lot of really cool organizations that are doing really cool things.

Yesterday, we brought in a speaker for some local nonprofits to help them with figuring out all the outs and ins of staying right with the law as a nonprofit.

She was from Guernsey County. Guernsey County is one of the ten least populated counties in the state with a population of 40,000. But Guernsey County has 600 nonprofit organizations. That means there is a nonprofit organization for every 70 people. That’s shocking.

At first, the idea of this many nonprofits just stressed me out. There are 30,000 nonprofits in West Virginia, a state with just under 1.9 million people. That’s a nonprofit for every 60 people. There is no way that each of those nonprofits is contributing something unique to the world. Wouldn’t it be better to combine some of those?

But then I realized that wasn’t really the problem. A couple of leaders of a local nonprofit started asking questions about insurance. They wanted to have volunteers drive senior citizens around. But they couldn’t do it because insurance for it would be through the roof.

That’s when it hit me. We need so many nonprofits because we fail each other as human beings about a hundred times a day. If we thought about people, if we took care of our neighbor, if we drove our elderly friends places, we wouldn’t need a billion nonprofits and we would change the world.

How do you help others?

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If Life Is A Battle, Then I Concede

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Sometimes I start to think that life is a battle. I think that I need to put on my armor, grab my sword before I walk outside, and get ready to kick some butt.

Or more accurately, I am a white, valiant knight and life is my evil enemy. I must defeat it and triumph over it.

I think that’s how a lot of people think about life. It’s about surviving. It’s about struggle.

The past couple of days, I feel like I’ve been struggling to keep my head above water. I’ve barely been getting assignments in on time. I’ve barely been breathing. And I feel worn out, and I feel like life is beating me.

Then I started thinking about it. All of that is really silly. Life isn’t trying to kill me. Life doesn’t really have an opinion one way or the other.

I think life is more like a series of moving sidewalks. The sidewalks don’t really care which one you are on, but the sidewalk you are on profoundly affects where you are going.

Or maybe life is like standing in the ocean. If you are an ocean-person, then you understand the waves. You know how to handle them so that they don’t drown you. Your body learns how to not let them tire you. And eventually you do grow weary, but it’s a peaceful weary. And the waves push you back towards shore because you know how to steer them.

Yeah, life is like standing in the ocean.