To Err is Human; To Forgive, Divine.

Can I begin by giving a big shout out of thanks to everyone in this world who has forgiven me for my ridiculous mistakes that affected them adversely? Thank you, you wonderfully charitable people! Thank goodness for the immortal words of Alexander Pope (see title of blog post). They fill me with blessed relief when I think of the mistakes, big and small, that I make on a regular basis. The mistakes I struggle with the most are the ones that involve other people. As I get older, the complexity of human relationships fascinates me more and more. No more do I see the world in black and white the way I did when I was a child. In my own life, I see clearly now how there is rarely a disagreement between reasonable adults, (for the purpose of this post I am not including cases of abuse and other bad situations), where one person is completely right and one person is completely wrong. This discovery (somewhat late in coming for me), changed my perspective drastically.

Now I see the many shades of gray that permeate everything. Hence our constant need to grow and develop as human beings. Hence our need to continue to seek for charity. Hence our need to reach out to one another, even if we have differences.

While I am always pained by the hurt that I sometimes cause people, I realize now that if I shy away from relationships, I'll never know the joy of truly connecting with other people. Thank goodness for humanity, for our capacity to err, for our capacity to forgive, for our capacity to love!

Burning the Midnight Numbers

Ahhhh, the joys of Daylight Savings Time! Here I sit, staring at the clock on my computer. It says 11:59pm, but my body knows that it is really 10:59 pm. Silly clock! This evening I attempted to venture to my comfy mattress early in the hopes of getting those two coveted hours of sleep in before midnight that are supposed to be so healthy and refreshing. Yet here I sit, awake and adding an unexpected entry to my blog. My mom gave me a tip tonight on how to fall asleep more quickly. She said she heard a guy suggest counting from 300 to 1 in your mind. Although this method was not successful for her, she thought it might be helpful for me, especially since sleep has been an elusive friend to me lately. Tonight I turned on the space heater, closed my eyes, got into my most comfortable bed-time scrunch and began to count backwards in my mind, starting with 300, of course. By the time I hit 260 I knew why the method was not going to work. It was because of my ability to multi-task. No kidding. Studies have shown that women are better at multi-tasking than men are, due to the make-up of our brains. As soon as I began counting backwards, my mind also began wandering over the day's happenings (which were very exhausting, let me tell you!), my list of things to do tomorrow, and other various thoughts. The idea behind counting backwards is to make your mind think of only that one task. The plan, however, was foiled. My mind wanders entirely too much to only think about one thing at one time (this occurs in the daytime as well). So now what do I do to lull myself to sleep? A lovely cup of hot cocoa might just do the trick.