Apathy

I hope to always have human compassion, no matter how desolate the world/economy/people seem to be.  I want to always care about problems that vary from our own microcosm to international turmoil.  Feeling bad for other human beings, even if their drug/alcohol/rage/fucked-up-ness addled brains confuse the hell out of me, is what ultimately shows my own humanity.

My parents weren't rich, but I learned the value of working hard.  I didn't have a college fund, and school administrators ignored the "likes" of me (& other so-called "vocational" kids), because our parents did not have the house or friends that made them important enough to be on their radar.  But I made my own way, even if it was late in coming, and funded my own schooling with very little dependence on student loans or anyone else giving me anything.  Is that the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality that is the American dream?  No, it's my own sense of self-reliance, and thank the universe I had it in me to do it.

That education is what I hope opened my eyes to suffering (self-induced or otherwise) and still allows me to keep giving them, strangers and family alike, the benefit of the doubt.  If their shit doesn't affect me, I hope to let it go.  And I want to keep discerning the difference between letting it go by realizing when it's none of my business and when I should sense the need to offer help.  By the law of averages, I should also be at least alcohol-dependent and living in a trailer in Marshall while scraping by while working at a convenience story.  But I am not.  Others are there or stuck in that mindset and way of thinking.  I can't pity them, but I need to have peace with them being complacent at where they are. 

Serenity comes when you trade expectations for acceptance.