Mental Musings

Betty was a woman struggling just to make it another day. She had tried everything to find some peace in her life, but every day she continued to be frustrated and felt like a failure. A friend suggested that she make an appointment with her therapist, so she did. At the first session the therapist told her that the way to achieve peace is to look around you and finish the things you have started. Betty’s friend called and asked how things were going. “Not, well,” Betty admitted. I saw the therapist and I was told that the secret to peace was to finish everything that I had started. “Did you try that?” her friend asked. “Yes, I did. I went home saw a half-eaten supersize bag of M&Ms, a half empty bottle of wine, half a cake, and half a gallon of ice-cream. I finished all of those, but I still don’t feel any peace.” Searching for peace. It seems that everywhere we look people are worried, troubled, concerned, angry, confused, afraid, and upset. People will try almost an...

There is a technique in writing, known as a simile or comparison or analogy, that allows the writer to describe an unseen or unknown thing using something the reader would certainly have seen or known. I came across these analogies that were sent to the Washington Post for a contest to find the funniest analogy. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike...

There is a legend about an unusual work of modern art back in the 1980s-a chair affixed to a shotgun. It was to be viewed by sitting in the chair and looking directly into the gun barrel. The gun was loaded and set on a timer to fire at an undetermined moment. People were told that it could happen at any time in the next 100 years. The legend claims people waited in lines to sit and stare into the shell's path! They all knew that the gun could go off at point-blank range at any moment, but they were gambling that the fatal blast wouldn't happen during their minute in the chair. There is no way to know if this legend was true. It seems unreal that anyone would knowingly risk their life like this. Yet we know that millions of people are living their lives just like that day after day. They know the truth, that the hammer could fall at any moment and then it will be too late, but they continue to sit and stare down the face of that truth without any attempt to move. ...