- give up smoking weed.
- not want to give up smoking weed.
- be a buddhist.
- get hit by a car.
- make excuses.
- be judged.
- love unrequitedly.
- lose my potential by not living up to it.
Dr. King said:
If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
At the end of June, Sotheby's, one of the big auction houses in New York, had on display many very rare documents of Dr. King, including drafts of the "I Have a Dream" speech with his handwritten notes in the margins. Lots of stuff with his handwriting on it. Isn't handwriting personal? It was intimate, poring over his sermons and bluebook examinations and letters to his congregation and his wife. As i stood in Saotheby's, dressed up (it's Dr. King, after all.), writing in my journal about what Dr. King had written in his, i felt like i was doing something that human beings had been doing for ages: using my own hands to do my own work.
This week, i listened to "I've Been to the Mountaintop," which was the speech he gave the day before he was assassinated. I thought, the world needs another Martin Luther King, jr. Then, by way of the maze of thoughts my mind winds itself through, i thought, no, wait, the world needs me to do my work. I remembered the exhibit, seeing his history in one place. None of us can predict the consequences of our actions; but i'm certain that Dr. King knew that what he was doing mattered. Not because he thought he was a superhero, but rather because he deeply understood that the actions that each of us take are important.
I have forgotten that lately and i've gotten lazy. When i remember that what i do matters, compassion and mindfulness absorb into my actions and apathy is negated. When i don't remember, i usually smoke too much pot and take a lot of baths. I've been lucky so far; my forgetfulness hasn't caused too much harm. But i keep asking myself this question: Am i being helpful? And further, what can i do to promote balance in the world i live in? And how are my actions contributing to imbalance?
Since i started this blog, an unexpected consequence has occured due to having an audience. I write about my trials and tribulations with weed all of the time in my journal; but until i became StonedGrrrl, i never had a mirror to show me what i looked like. What this mirror is showing me is that justifying my weed habit is becoming more and more untrue. I could spend the rest of my life smoking weed like Michelangelo painted pictures; but i don't know if it would be worth it.
4 comments:
you do realize that your number 1 & 2 "i dont want to's" are the same thing dont you? it's called a double negative. maybe you should stop smoking (for a little bit) before you write these things.
i know rules of grammar pretty well (though these posts aren't usually edited with that fine-toothed of a comb, i admit.). part of knowing grammar is knowing when to break the rules.
#1 states my lack of desire to give up weed. #2 states that i don't want my lack of desire. In other words, i don't want to give up smoking weed, but i want to want to give it up. I might have said "i don't want to give up smoking weed," followed by, "i don't want to smoke weed for the rest of my life." But in that case the emphasis of #2 would have been on the act of smoking weed itself, whereas i wish the emphasis to be placed on my desire. Perhaps it is not grammatically correct, but it is exactly what i wanted to say.
oh, and also, if you're going to leave a somewhat snarky comment that nitpicks over grammar and doesn't speak to the body of text at all, don't post anonymously. it's wimpy.
Youre kinda funny in a bitchy way :) All I can say for your dilema is that I have smoked pot for about 10 years now and have no desire to cease this wonderful habit, aditionally I am sucsessful and motivated in my career goals and truely believe that smoking has only imporved my quality of life. So basically all I am trying to say is that if you can still pick apart and separate weed from other more responsible parts of life than I think you are in the clear, enjoy the relaxation of pot, besides you only live once right?
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