• RSS
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • CTH

Monday, June 17, 2013

Decisions... We all make them and sometimes we loathe them.  Today I made a decision I should not have.  Well, actually, I made two and they were in the form of food consumption.
What in the hades is this?
This is a Cheeto's Puff.  I do not eat things like this anymore because I have been on sort of a permanent junk food sobriety for about nine months now and I feel fantastic.  But you know how it goes.  You see something you remember being yummy and want to relive it once.  No, just no.  I ate five and not only felt as if I had ingested an artificially-flavored brick, but the salt seriously hurt my tongue.
I finished my realm of fantastic choices with this.  Also a bad idea because I have this acid reflux thing that had all but subsided entirely over the course of my diet change, until today.  Something about HFCS turns my stomach into a blender of pain that puts me on the very edge of thinking the consumption of kerosene would have been a better life choice.  
If you can eat this stuff, more power to you.  For most of my life I very well could, but now?  My body would like it much more if I spent a few hours chewing on paint chips as opposed to consuming any of the above.

What the heck does any of this have to do with anything at all?  I am going back to the decisions thing I mentioned in the beginning.  I made the decision to tell you fantastic people about my self-destructive actions today and I hope it made you snicker a little, but there are times where telling others about your decisions is not the best thing to do.  

I have touched on humility before but want to give a real-world example.  Now, I do not watch the news on television with any sense of commitment, but I did catch something in passing today that bothered me.  Yesterday, there was a man and woman in a packed restaurant here in Atlanta who made the decision to pick up the tab for the entire restaurant, very clandestinely.  The couple told their server to add every bill to theirs and allow them to be anonymous through the transaction.  These two made a selfless decision to do a good deed without wanting anything in return.  They left and everything was fine until the server snapped a picture of the couple while her camera was hidden before they left.  She then contacted the news station, had an on-camera interview, and allowed the station to post the picture she had taken of the couple.  Their gesture was ruined.  Sure it still meant they did what they wanted out of the goodness of their hearts, which is wonderful, but they asked not to be exposed and their server could not even do them that request and instead had a few selfish minutes talking to a reporter on television.  Now much of Atlanta has seen the faces of the do-gooders who wanted nothing at all but to do something selfless.

Part of my simple mind tends to think that there was once a point in time where there were many people like the couple in the restaurant, but good deeds have sort of lost their merits by a lack of humility.  You see it all the time on social media "This person was in distress and I helped.  Here is how I did it!  Look at me, look at me!  Pay it forward!".  When it comes to situations like that where we give ourselves praise and look for the all important Facebook "Like" or Twitter "Retweet" for something that should have been selfless, I feel the whole intention of paying an action forward has been negated.  Maybe I am just old fashioned in that sense, I am not sure, but something seems wrong about doing that.

"Shut up!  You write blogs about what you do for people!"  Sometimes, I do mention those things, but they are in the interest of my personal beliefs and not for self-promotion or personal praise, ego boost, or anything of that nature.  If you have not taken notice, I am very vocal about being fairly hard on myself at times for not doing enough for people when I should.  My blogs and the things I say are not to lead by example, but to provoke thoughts in other people in a way to make us all breathe a little bit.  The mindset I have comes from a different decade, when bragging about being a nice person or your good deeds was not accepted because doing so meant it happened face to face; so if you did that, someone would kick your ass for acting that way...

I am not judging, you can type whatever you want just like I can;  you have that right and so do I.  Sharing such things with certain people when it makes sense within a situation is fine or when someone is proving a point.  Blasting personal acknowledgement for hundreds or thousands of people to see to garner individual praise means we should probably study our own humility a bit more deeply and exemplify positive actions because we want to.

The moral of the blog? Stay away from junk food.  My stomach hurts.

Grace and Peace,
    -Drew


The title of this blog came from the lyrics in this song:
   

0 comments:

Post a Comment