We Are One... We Are Powerful... We Are...

AFRAID

I guess I need to update the tagline of my blog, since Frozen Heart (which is what my icon is) no longer reduces the attack speed of nearby enemies by 20%. It's 15% now... but I should probably just find a different icon, because Frozen Heart doesn't even seem applicable anymore.

The interface round these parts is rather difficult to navigate. It's a terrible chore just to find where I'm supposed to go to even change that little picture.

There. I found it.

I'm scared. Scared that I've been too complacent, but that if I do anything more I'll overextend; scared that I've waited too long, but that if I don't wait longer I won't let things run their natural course.

I was playing Dr. Love to a 16 year old girl the other night. She, a sophomore in high school, has one of those delightful pseudo-relationships with a senior, a fellow who's gonna be going to college several hours away come Fall. She asked me for my opinion on the situation, and I didn't have the heart to tell her it wasn't gonna work out. Those kinds of relationships rarely do. Of course, I could be wrong. As I told her, I know guys who have been with their wives since high school, so successfully navigating that relational minefield isn't totally unheard of, it's just quite uncommon.

To her credit, she did show a reasonable degree of apprehension, if only because of the uncertainty attached to a long-distance relationship (especially between one person who's in college and another who's still in high school hours away), but I told her if it's what she really wants, then there's no reason not to at least give it a shot. I said to think of it this way: you walk by a table. There's a ball sitting on the table, a bright and shiny ball, and it's very enticing. You want it, so go ahead and pick it up. If it turns out that the ball is radioactive and burns your hand off... well that's what robotic prosthetics are for. You just get a new robot hand and say "that didn't turn out so well, so now I know for next time not to pick up the shiny ball." So you keep walking and on the next table is a cool looking box. You're curious as to what's inside the box, so you open it up, and it turns out that it's poisonous gas that burns up your lungs. So you go and get robot lungs, and now you know not to open that kind of box again. And you keep walking along and picking up intriguing objects until either you find one that isn't harmful or you're entirely robot, and neither of those outcomes is really bad.

For once, I handed out some advice that I actually believed in, at least for the most part. The point of my analogy was not to let the fear of failure or loss keep you from trying or having. If you want something, you have to go after it, and you can't let the notion that you might lose it or not even get it in the first place stop you from taking your shot.

And here I am tonight, watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and that seems to be one of the central themes of the movie. I'm only about halfway in, so I'll have to assess that with finality once it's over, but maybe I could stand to learn a thing or two from this movie. And from myself.