I have a confession to make, and it’s not pretty.
I have a dysfunctional relationship with sunglasses.
Actually, one could go as far as calling me the sunglass sadist.
I break my sunglasses constantly. And these aren’t little injuries.
They fall off the console in my car and get stepped on. They get tossed in the bottom of my bag and crushed by my wallet or scratched by keys. They get run over. They get eaten by my dogs.
I’ll put it to you this way. People who did something very bad in a past life come back as a pair of my sunglasses.
Last week, another pair met its maker when it had a rough collision with a running shoe, sending me out to the store on the sunglass search once again.
As I glanced through the racks at the local department store, I decided to try Aviators.
Halfway to the register, I opted to buy a spare pair.
In the car on the way home, I questioned my decision to go for the second pair. It wasn’t a matter of money. They were actually quite reasonable.
It was a matter of my anticipation of the worst case scenario, meaning, one of those pairs would be broken within a week, and I wanted to be prepared.
Some of you live prepared for the worst. You have your spare sunglasses and water and flashlights and generators for emergencies. You have your extra cash in the house and your full tank of gas.
Some of you wing it. Maybe you wing it because you are not thinking ahead, or maybe you believe “life happens,” and we have to roll with it. Maybe you’re an optimist, plain and simple.
I believe in being prepared, but I also believe there is a line we can cross where our preparedness is no longer logical and we are reacting out of fear.
Furthermore, as prepared as you are with your generators and waters and stockpile of canned foods, and not letting your kids play in your front yard in anticipation that there is a child abductor lurking at every corner, there really is no such thing as security.
Security is an illusion.
We can be prepared, but we will never be in control.
There are problems that all of the money in the bank and all of the canned ham in the world won’t solve.
Before you buy into the next media frenzy or stockpile more ham, or decide to hide in your house, maybe it’s time to ask yourself why you’re stockpiling all that ham.
Is all that ham really necessary?
Furthermore, before you buy into the next media frenzy and stockpile more ham, maybe ask yourself what else you could do with all that energy you expend on stockpiling ham or rehashing in your mind all of the atrocities you see on cable network news channels.
My guess is that energy might be better used elsewhere.
Not to change the subject, but any bets on how long my new sunglasses will last?
(Editor’s note: If you felt that canned ham was being singled out in this article, it was. As a lifelong vegetarian, I took this rant as an opportunity to give ham the thrashing I felt it deserved. Fifty Shades of Ham, anyone?)
Namaste - or should I say...
Laters, Baby
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