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If there was a future
Would you know where to find it?

Within the instant of the moment, there is only the here and now. Patience becomes a lost art form as people struggle to bring themselves up to code with what they see around them. They roll the big screen television of devotion into their living rooms and tell all the silent nobodies of their daily existence all about it. This is the stuff of dreams. Tomorrow they will upgrade the rest of their lives. They will achieve compliance.

To survive is to adapt. To live is to go beyond adaptation. Any badly written novel or poorly conceived motion picture can be adapted to something more palatable. It doesn't take that much effort. You question your reasons for adaptation. Or maybe you do not. Maybe you simply seek acceptance through compliance. Maybe you throw yourself into the fan blades and demand compensation. No one decides how you travel the road other than you.

If they kissed your eyes
Would it help you see?
Would it make you cry?

It is necessary to adapt. It is a core principle of existing within a communal reality. You adapt to survive and to co-exist, but if all you do is constantly adjust and adapt to your surroundings, you become your surroundings. There is no longer anything that defines you as an individual. If you lose who you are in order to adapt, then there is nothing.

No matter how lost you feel you have become in your journey through life, there is time to recover the self. Dreams never leave you, but they change with the times as much as you do. There are those things that will stay with you throughout your life. They will remain important, even in the face of logic and reason. There are things you would surrender everything else you have gained in order to recover or find again. Often we slip these hopes and dreams into a back pocket and watch them spin in the commercial washing machine of time. Enough soap and water ought to drown them out of the heart, but we are human. We can never become that clean.

People have a secret dream
To be somebody's number one.
Remember this.

People tend to settle a little too quickly on second best. They may fight to convince themselves that this second best road will give them everything they want and need. They see no reason to reach for the stars if the moon is parked in their backyard. They will lie, cheat and steal if it will help them achieve compliance with the standards of success and happiness they have been taught.

When do they become honest?

You are always in delicate negotiations until you reach the point when you open yourself to the firestorms of honesty. You cannot negotiate honesty, it is what it is and there is no collection of experts convening to decide what to keep, what to throw out and what to debate. There is only honesty, and the blade is as sharp going in as it is coming out.

Honesty can blind you
Diluted honesty doesn't mean a thing
When you are searching for truth
And you're carrying a gun you never intend to load

It always comes back to people. We wind our way around people, drifting in and out of their orbits in search of something they may or may not answer within us. Whenever we get intimately involved with another human being, there is a tendency to wonder "Am I the one you would choose over all others?" This is usually answered with the usual roll call of celebrity desirables, but this is a time tested way of skirting the issue. Can you really commit yourself to this kind of a question just to get someone's pants off?

Beyond that, can you commit to an answer of that question in order to build a mutually beneficial partnership with another? It will come up. It always does. No one wants to be second best, but what if second best is all you can offer. Are you willing to lie to preserve the partnership or are you able to confront the truth?

You cannot go back in time, no matter how many times you fantasize about going back and "doing it right this time." Yet, we often forget that a story can be rewritten in the present tense. People change and take different roads. We think we have lost each other, but have we really. Two roads diverge in a snowy wood, but at some point they converge again, if you believe that they will.

If you were to unearth an old novel you wrote many years ago, could you rewrite it in the present tense, given what you've learned since then? You will likely laugh at much of the foolishness and how silly you were back then. Perhaps you will see ideas and a storyline that you can do something with now. You know how to write the difficult passages and you know how the ending could be with a bit of change in direction. You sit down and you tear the old story apart and create a new work of art. That was then. This is now. You've grown, you've adapted and you have learned much over the years. You are ready to go to print.

And life is often just like that
If you believe

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