The most important thing to Randy was leaving behind a legacy of truth to his children.  I love the fact that he called out how he won the parent lottery, which is very rarely heard these days.  Much more obligation and strain comes screaming through in parents’ actions, when you open your eyes and look around.  Nonetheless, he had a specific purpose, filled with many avenues to truth, for writing this piece, but he never wavers from the core of what is most important to him.

It makes you think (the dog-eared pages remind me of that over and over) about what’s meaningful in your own life.  When it comes to people, the most important person in my life has always been my mom.  Recently, she & I have undergone some pretty telling attacks from family members that was quite frankly, a long time coming, because of the nature of their collective and individual characters.   The degree of lunacy and mistruths that comprise who they are as human beings are much too lengthy for anything resembling a blog.  But the principles within “The Last Lecture” speak succinctly to people like them, pleading for them to see the ruinous lives they lead, how it impacts others, and the resulting pain.

Randy speaks of truth, and this is something that is very obvious, these people have never genuinely known.  To the core of who they were as children, to the sad but plain reality of how adulthood has happened upon them, without them learning an iota from the past.

Randy makes excellent points about rights and responsibility.  People like them love to spout off about the “rights” they have or that everyone else doesn’t have, but the very core of their character lakes responsibility.  The two are married, and they have severely overlooked that.

Truth in the context of staying the course.  Randy’s most valued quote to me is, “It’s interesting, the secrets you decide to reveal at the end of your life.”  My mom has been the primary caregiver of every sick and now deceased person in my family.   And the secrets that have been revealed to her are pretty incredible, and I only know about them because there is no line of segregation between mom & me.  But what struck me on that quote on an even deeper level is that those that don’t decide to reveal their own set of truths to whomever before they leave their life as they know it.  What a pent-up shame.  What a waste to the ones you leave behind.  Infused with quite a bit of selfishness, and iced with dishonesty.  Hence, going against Truth.

This book is a multiple-re-read.  And each time, as with any good read, you can’t help but gain perspective.  I loved his near-closing lines about a life lived.  “It’s not about how to achieve your dreams.  It’s about how to lead your life.  If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself.”  I go back to my inspiration for life when I read this, my mom.  And I have to put it in a macro and micro perspective.  Stepping way the hell back, it’s wonderful to stand where I do and simply know that people like mom exist.  That there are still people out there like her, however few and miles between.  And she has cultivated a key number of people who would stand underneath her and lift her as far as they could upward, if only to make her feel for half a second how glorious the sum of her actions has been. 

Microscopically speaking, there are times like this, when she has been confronted with ignorance at its finest, as well as an enormously sour dose of ingratitude from those that she thought would be a part of her life till the end.  To watch her disposed of in the most heartless set of actions, by people that lived to self-serve, is the absolute polar opposite of goodness.

It’s easy to be misled by liars.  It’s equally easy to walk away and take stock in what’s real when confronted with such caliber of people. 

As for me, I’m on the sidelines of this one, at heart.  I’ve known for quite some time about the true nature of the so-called righteous users who gladly accepted my mom’s grace & good heart, and turned on a dime, once it no longer suited them.  And as I’ve always known, it’s in their best interests to use every device they can scrounge up to avoid the truth.  Sadly, she hoped for more out of them, but they dimed themselves off that there is no way around it.

The book is a good reminder that people like them, once family, but never true to themselves let alone others, are inconsequential and as good as the false platform from which they preach.

The Last Lecture puts it all in perspective, in a way that makes anyone with a sense of genuine heart capacity, able to absorb the meaning. 

My mom serves as a tribute to many of my writings because she is a gem.  And still unaware of just how valuable she is.  It is my privilege to be her daughter, and I try to remind her of that more than once daily. 

Not everyone has a mom like I do.  And not everyone has a piece of the family pie that is full of venom.  I have both, and if there was one general take-away from Randy’s book that made some sense of it was that you have to have some bad to appreciate the good for what it’s really worth.   While I have the ‘righteous sisters’ and their continuous plea to spread their toxicity, the good within my mom outweighs in spades.

It seems to me that I am some sort of magnet for this mentality from men.  The ones that find me PERFECT for them, but just not right now.  Something, in their life, always gets in the way and detracts from this so-called perfection.  It was flattering the first few times… at this stage in my life it’s a complete joke.

The guy that proclaims you are everything he ever wanted, but… but he is not emotionally available quite yet because of his previous relationship.

The one that wants to preserve you because since you almost seem to good to be true, he needs to go out and test the waters “just to be sure.”

The pussy that’s afraid of really diving into you because it is that good… he’s used to bad & sticks this karmic badge on you.  Of course, he doesn’t want you to see anyone else… he just needs you to wait.

The one that pretends by him sticking you on this shelf that it’s really a pedestal.  It’s not… it’s a shelf where dust collects and life is stagnant all the while waiting for him to come pluck you out at his convenience.

I’ve been sucked into this trap more often than I care to admit, but it’s often a vortex.  I had a deal about fifteen years ago with a man I adored.  We said if we weren’t married by the time we hit a certain age, we would marry.  We did this because he wasn’t ready to commit to me because of many of the reasons above.  We were terrific together, but he literally wanted to shelve me.  It wasn’t about preserving me from a looks standpoint with respect to aging… it was about him wanting to go and do and be and experience and then… have the option to come retrieve me at his convenience.

I always viewed the shelf concept, at least from a realistic standpoint (like where I do put my books) as a temporary holder for things I valued.  It was great to be reminded of as I walked by.  It was nice to know that something I took great pleasure in was within my reach at any given time.  But what a horrible concept to do to another human being.   It brings selfishness and self-righteousness into completely new territories… those that should remain undiscovered.

“Suddenly it occurred to me that I’m so busy trying to work out if he wants me or not that I’ve forgotten to clarify if I want him.” Zeruya Shalev, Love Life

Within moments of leaving my naked side, he called me as he boarded his plane to go back to his life, his wife, his 2.2 kids, and his multimillion dollar investments to say, “I can smell you so much that I think you have become a part of my nostril hair.”
He was attractive, fun, and most notably, easy. He had been with countless women that unlike me had required payment for their services, many that didn’t, some from whom he received refunds.
I didn’t care about any of that as our tongues collided and our bodies were given free reign to move, explore, and experience.
Crude? Maybe. But for me, this was not only an escape through my quest at climbing out of the middle, but an abandonment from all of the messiness of jealousy, love, clinginess, and false hopes for meaningful tomorrows. The middle could be so cold and devoid of emotion that I preferred the heat from my own slap in the face, rather than to have to cope with another minute of solitude and perpetual shivers.
Periodically in my life, as I took the time to recount past experiences, I remembered the consensus among the sexes in my life telling me that my behavior was not odd in general, but odd for a woman, more in keeping with a man. So, with this position as “the other woman,” I left my emotions at the door like so many men before (underneath) me had done.

Completely.

Yes, he was married. Yes, he was another one of the people in my world that I was heavily entangled with from a professional standpoint. Yes, it was all the same shit that stunk just as badly before.
Except NOW I was weightless. A brief truce with my middle-doom. I accepted my lot. I knew I was in the middle, but I stepped up and made some demands of my own. The last thing I was going to do this time was beat myself up for something that I gave myself permission to do.
I circled the middle like a boxer would with his opponent, grabbed my “stuff,” and took off for a while.
I had a friend once tell me that as a woman, I was always in the driver seat. I interpreted it more as the seat between the driver and the passenger. Until the Smeller. With him, I acted like I was in charge, like I COULD call all the shots. In fact, I took some lessons from him to throw right back at him.
I didn’t worry about tomorrow and lived in the seconds of the moment. I separated love from all sorts of physical expressions. I didn’t wince when he called to say night to wifey. I didn’t marvel at his lack of hesitation when he gave me my time to call home, whoever “home” was for me at the time. I didn’t try to find meaning with him before or after enjoying him. I abandoned my middle tendencies in favor of carelessness. We sat shoulder to shoulder drinking our night to blacker night. We lay pressed against each other with no greater visions than what could be encapsulated right then, which, ultimately, was never contained.
I would like to launch into an in-depth dissertation as to how this cured my middle disease, my insane need to stay embedded in places and people I didn’t belong. I would love to conclude that my learning experience with the Smeller propelled me to care less about others and value myself more, to truly live for the moment instead of for analyzing the moment.
But why? Just as soon as I stepped off the wagon, I was right back on, with only distant memories of my apathetic detour. I didn’t last long as a free woman.
Why didn’t I? Was it my need to be back in familiar territory? No, I could’ve turned that situation into something like that if I wanted to.
Loss of control by the absence of crowding? Maybe. I truly was free for a concentrated period of time, not bothering with the things that tended to pull me in; those magnetic thrusts from my heavily populated antenna.
But I was used to so much MORE! Heaviness. Complication. Meaning in everything. Circular momentum that afforded me significance.
If I kept myself at the heart of scattered matters, I was indeed significant, and as long as this was true, I didn’t have time to dwell on the lack of importance staring blankly, starkly, and squarely at me.

‘You don’t know me.’

‘I recognise you.’

I nodded. Love is recognition. Love is re-cognition; a re-thinking of all we know, and all we are, because someone stands in front of us like a mirror.

D took out his binoculars and scanned the red horizon. He passed them to me, pointing. A long line of US tanks was moving slowly towards our position.

‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Are you afraid?’

I shook my head and took his hand. I had hardly seen him before today, and I would not see him tomorrow. But this moment had years wrapped inside it, time before and time after. If there is a parallel world lying next to ours, perhaps it is at peace, and I will find you there.

If I cried again over someone that stayed for either a short or long while in my life, did I forget that there is joy in that too?