Theory 31: The Value of Conscious Wisdom (or alternatively) "Smart" just means "Less Dumb"

One of my greatest joys in life is looking back and remembering how much stupider I used to be.

That’s it. That is Theory 31.

As you can see I have spent over a year working on being more concise. Those who don’t enjoy my babbling can feel free to click elsewhere.


And now for a marginally relevant digression to show my theory in action:

As a recently minted 37 year old I spent a morning caressing my hangover and thinking deep thoughts about what I have learned in the last year. I think it is crucial to regularly stop and perform this exercise (thus the theory). Of the things I have learned this year, this is my favourite:

I envy my friends for having me to mock.

Cool eh? I can see that coming up as a daily quote on my customized iGoogle page. Makes me feel pretty smart.

I am going to go back to explaining the theory now.

¬¬¬¬

I have never really understood why people take pride in being smarter than other people. Clearly intelligence and wisdom are extremely useful in navigating the world and interacting with the other humans, and I have no doubt that it represents a tremendous advantage. This can lead to all kinds of valid emotions, such as being incredulous at the stupidity of others and how it inconveniences you, or being relieved that you aren’t as dumb as all of those people that you aren’t quite as dumb as. It makes sense that being smart is both important and even rewarding, but taking pride is a horse of a different colour.

Sometimes I enjoy watching my cat and thinking about how stupid she is. She can’t learn simple patterns, she still thinks that walking on my lap top is a good idea and she refuses despite all my encouragement to learn a second word. I could go on and on.

The fact that she is smart relative to other cats is not important. She is dumb relative to me.

Other times I picture an alien (possibly the one from Theory 10) looking down and enjoying how stupid I am. I can’t break bad habits (or even snap), I routinely do things that I know are not a good idea and I find matching my socks to be a terrible imposition and an affront to the entire species. I could go on and on.

My point is that there is no objective measure for the term “smart”. (I consider useful tools like IQ and EQ more a means of trying to quantify the subjective and I I am also taking a broad definition of smart that includes base intelligence and the ability to gain wisdom.) “Smart” is a completely relative term that in and of itself sheds no light on anything. When I call you “smart” I am really just saying “many humans are dumber than you”. So what?

If we work from the starting point that “the” (or at least “a”) key goal in life to is generate some level of happiness or contentment or at least some sense of satisfaction and/or appreciation from the experience, I am convinced that being smart relative to other humans adds little to the equation. I know it can help, the same way that being born into a rich family can help, or that being tall can help, but I think we tend to confuse intelligence with worth and self-identity, and this makes no more sense than feeling superior for being born tall or being born into a great family (like mine). People will still ultimately be judged on whether they do the right thing (in some collective sense), and the right thing isn't the same as the smart thing.

I know another cat that is much dumber than my cat, and he is a much more content cat. It is not because he is dumber. (It’s actually more because he is less of a complete bitch.) My point is that ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s immaterial. Anybody who thinks that his/her wisdom, intelligence or insight is some kind of burden needs to be reminded that he/she is a complete moron next to the alien that I made up in my head.

(Sometimes I picture another, even smarter alien watching the first alien while it is watching me while I am watching my cat. Then I picture another smarter alien and then another. I picture some remote planet where quantum physics is grade one fodder for some alien in special ed. That is how I discovered that marijuana, unlike intelligence, can be evaluated objectively.)

There is one thing, however, that we humans are “smart” enough to enjoy: we get to consciously experience becoming wiser. We get to look back on all the dumb things we have done and see them for how dumb they really were, and deep down we get to know that we are doing now is also dumb and we will probably look back on it and feels stupid. It makes no difference to becoming a “self-actualized person” to measure how smart we are relative to one another, but it makes a huge difference to feel smarter than the poor fool that we know we used to be. We evolve and improve before our own eyes.

No matter your level of existentialism or self-loathing, this (in my mind) gives the entire experience of living some level of depth and meaning completely separate from any notion of external meaning or divine fate. As you will soon see, this is an absolutely crucial part of the larger theory that “The Book of Mark” is trying to construct.

You’ll have to wait to find out why. Or you can just not care and stop coming to this site - whatever – I haven’t posted in a year so I have given up on having (or even deserving) readers. I now just use this blog to keep a factual record of how dumb I used to be.

The End.

As an additional side note, for those of who have noticed that I have started to post my theories out of order, I would like to remind you that this is my blog and you should feel free to send any complaints in a self addressed envelope to the deeper regions of your own ass.

Theory 20: A Picture of Dorian Graying

As a 35 year old man who has to stretch before playing ping pong, I have many reasons to suspect that I am old and past my prime. Hangovers are harder. New technologies frighten and confuse me.

Worst of all I remember how, when I was younger, people who are my age now would tell me how old they are. They would tell me how their bodies are changing, or how they are always tired. I remember thinking “35 is old.”

I suppose that most of us view life as some kind of crooked bell curve where, after running around like an idiot for 15 years, we suddenly begin this steep ascension leading to our glorious twenties, where all the energy of youth finally combines with the freedom of adulthood. Then, at the onset of thirty, mortality taps on the shoulder and the long process of watching your body deteriorate begins. For most of us, death isn’t a man in a black robe with a scythe, it is just a small innocuous leach that starts sucking the life out of you on your thirtieth birthday and never stops to breathe until many years later when you yourself finally stop breathing.

Something like this:

We modern humans make it tough on ourselves - we consider ourselves in the absolute prime of our lives when we are in our twenties and then one day the number on the left column changes and everyone shifts gears. Houses get bigger and further away from civilization, kids start dropping like troublseome triffles. We get tired. We get serious about the future. We settle down. The fun and silliness all slip away, and we start to feel older. We feel the days when we had limitless future as turned into our limited present, and our whole lives are no longer ahead of us.

Now that I have climbed the crooked mountain to 35 I have some observations.
It is true that we all experience a gradual physical decline for the majority of our lives. I haven’t bothered to look it up, but personal experience backs up the theory that this begins right around the age of 30. However, I have learned this slow decline is offset by sharp increase in our ability to navigate the challenges of our lives though wisdom and experience. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our "emotional prime", "intellectual prime", or even perhaps our "spiritual prime", doesn’t really greet us until after our physical prime has run its course.
When I was younger I remember hearing a lot of nonsense from older people who would say "if I only knew then what I know now . ." I never really believed this. After all, why couldn’t these people just tell me what they had learned? If there are these great secrets that you learn when you are older, why hasn’t someone shared them?

Sadly, I have now come to suspect that people tell the secrets that one learns with age all of the time:

"Be true to thine own self"
"You reap what you sew"
"The trick is to only get a LITTLE high"
(I could go on and on with these common wisdoms but I need to get back to going on and on about my main point.)

These are concepts I was able to grasp as a younger man when I first heard them. The problem is that they seem to gradually take on more and more meaning as time goes on, and I have realized how difficult it is to be true to yourself, or how it takes a life’s commitment to sew enough for a good reaping, or that sometimes you’re already much too high before you know it.

Thus the contrast of the human aging process: if we experience our spiritual or intellectual or emotional prime after our physical bodies have already passed their prime and started to decline, then at what point are we really in "the prime of our lives"?

It seems to me that to even make a cursory answer at such a complicated question I need to break down all aspects of the human personality and chart how they rise and fall during the human aging process. But that's just me. So, in the most cursory of ways, that’s is exactly what I am going to do now.
Noted sociologist/daydreamer Gary Gygax once, as part of some other less meaningful project, actually took the time to break down all human (and near human) characteristics, both physical and cerebral, into six main categories. I am now going to prepare a chart for each of these six categories attempting to describe how each one is affected by the human aging process. I am not going to bother commenting during these because that would make the theory too damn long. Suffice to say I put this together intuitively and without research. This remains a cursory glance based on immediate intuition: a simple experimient into my own perceptions and what I might learn about them.

Characteristic 1: Strength

Characteristic 2: Intelligence

Characteristic 3: Wisdom

Characteristic 4: Dexterity

Characteristic 5: Constitution

Characteristic 6: Charisma

I will say again, this is quickly thrown together and not meant to be scientific. In spite of this, I was still curious to see what I could learn when I jumbled it all together. Here is your composite chart of human characteristics through the human life cycle. complete with a trend line provided by the good people at Microsoft Powerpoint.

Turns out I accidentally proved (using the broadest possible context of the word) that the prime of your life, when you look beyond simple physical characteristics in order to incorporate the full life experience, is actually 35. More importantly, the ages of 45 and 55, despite further physical decline, still rank roughly as high as the period when we are 25. Gotta love the crap that you can mathematically prove with charts.

What does it all mean?

Before I alert the scientific community, there are a few small caveats we should all keep in mind:

1) The values I gave for each characteristic were arbitrarily chosen by me. I have no doubt that many of you will take issue with some of my choices. I encourage you to repeat the exercise yourself and determine your own average values.
2) I should confess that the human characteristics I based this analysis on are not quite universally accepted, though they do have a strong following.
3) The idea of giving all six characteristics equal weight, though damn sporting, is also arbitrary and without and scientific basis, in keeping with the general theme.
4) In spite of this negativity, I did stay true to the experiment and stick with my initial intuitive values for each human characteristic.

Nonetheless, (can I still say "nonetheless" or has that ship sailed?), it does leave us with one piece of information, a little thing I call "Theory 20":

We humans have a tendency to put far too much emphasis on our physical being when evaluating our own life span. This leads to a lot of unnecessary neurosis and insecurity, and prevents us from realizing how much opportunity we still have to develop. However, if one takes a balanced approach in looking at the full experience of life, taken in context with our continually expanding life spans and our gradual decline in physical ability, we are fortunate to be at or reasonably close to the prime of our lives for much longer than we allow ourselves to believe. Our strengths and/or our challenges may change, but life is no less enriching. As someone who is only beginning to get a glimpse of the value of experience and wisdom, and only beginning to understand the true commitment that applying these qualities require, I feel that 35 may very well be the best year that one gets to experience.

36 I am a little worried about.

In considering this theory one question stuck in my mind. If all of this ridiculous age-friendly optimism holds true, than why do most people over 30 not share in my theory?

Well, aside from very real and practical considerations like both having and raising children, or feeling naturally compelled to compare ourselves to our parents, I suspect the answer lies in something as simple and shallow as this:

Update on Theory 20

The next theory should be out within a week or two. The latest topic will explore how we view and experience age. I hope for this theory to include charts.

Of course this will require me to figure out how one attaches charts while using blogger. Sadly, this will probably involve me doing some basic amount of research.

Sigh.

Theory 19: Frankenstein’s Burden or Beer and No Clothing in Las Vegas

The best Book of Mark theories flow seamlessly from paragraph to paragraph until the new theory inevitably arrives in a puff of what has the distinct appearance of logic.

Sadly, this is not one of those theories.

This week I will be jumping all over the place from tangent to tangent, and then I will try to miraculously pull it together as one coherent point in the end. What’s worse - this is my "green theory". I am assuming that some people might find this annoying. Let me know what you think.

Tangent #1: Las Vegas

I am standing in a popular and ridiculous night club in the former desert of Las Vegas. Full of liquor and deep in thought, I am amazed as usual at the lavishness of Las Vegas, the hordes of beautiful people and the mystical paradox of human accomplishment and shallowness.
A tall person walks by and my mind wanders to Frankenstein, and just like that, standing drunk at 4:00 in the morning, I finally have a handle on elusive Theory 19. How fitting.
I owe a lot to Las Vegas. After all, I may not believe in God, karma, or that everything happens for a reason, but I am still a reasonably spiritual person who needs my fix for transcendental journeys of the soul.

Muslims perform the Hajj; Buddhists travel to Bodh Gaya or several other places; Devout Christians travel to the Way of St. James in Spain; Less devout or "half-assed Christians" travel once a year to Church on Christmas Day after they are made to feel guilty by the Charlie Brown Xmas special. I don’t feel that I have those options, so I go to what I consider to be the most spiritual place in the world: Las Vegas.

I don’t mean to insult anyone with that rather reckless comparison. To the untrained eye, Las Vegas may appear to be nothing more than a blended frozen cocktail of neon, fake breasts, gaudy carpets and underappreciated money. This view is both short sighted and unimaginative. Las Vegas is more than just a vacation destination for people who like to cheat on their spouses and contradict their thinly woven moral codes. It is a microcosm of the strengths and flaws of our very species, and these observations are key to Theory 19.

Tangent #2: Frankenstein: It’s alive.

Although most of us remember the Frankenstein story from its many brilliant adaptations as part of the classic Hammer Horror Film Productions, the truth is that it originated from the wordy, preachy but also brilliant Mary Shelley novel. (Note - that is an especially funny link.) Ms. Shelley was not a big fan of the industrial revolution and was trying to warn of the dangers of human progress. It was a story of man trying to accomplish more than it should, and having to live with the violent and frightening results. Ms. Shelley may not have stopped the revolution, but if she were alive today (a movie Hammer should consider) she would have little trouble spotting how increasingly relevant her science fiction has become.

Tangent #3: The Evolution Paradox

Let me start by saying that I have always been and remain a big fan of human freedom (including capitalism) and the human evolution that results from it. Leaving humanity unfettered is the key to its growth. I seem to recall I may have made this point before. However, we need to take a realistic view of this. The truth is that human growth, progress and evolution often comes at such a breakneck pace that it causes terminal and devastating side effects. (For more on this I recommend Ronald Wright’s fantastic 2004 book A Short History of Progress which is available free online right here.)

Back in the 50's and 60's we got an unprecedented taste of the inherent danger of "not recognizing our own strength". Children grew up in the shadow of a potential nuclear war. This was probably the first generation to grow up understanding just how much of an impact we can have on our own planet - if we get ourselves worked up enough we can completely destroy it. So what have we, the post-nuclear generation, collectively learned? For one thing, we have learned that there is more than one way to skin a planet.

Amidst the genius of insulin, the Internet, micro-loans and a million other things, we are living (almost literally) on the hot seat with the threat of a new ice age (arguably self-made). It is nice to see global warming getting some press (has anyone ever used the term "scorched earth" literally . .) but it is not our only serious problem. I am putting my money on mass extinctions as the next hot button issue. Ultimately it is difficult to argue with the fact that human evolution and progress, the concept I still stand by and adore, is gradually depleting all of the natural resources that we rely on for life, security and 21st century convenience. (On a personal note, as a scuba diver, cyanide fishing of coral reefs and the fact that fish in the middle of the ocean are full of mercury are two things that I have never been able to get my head around).
How do we reconcile this? How do we manage the complex relationship between our growth and the question of whether or not we can manage it? Well, if you ask me, it all starts by taking the Frankenstein monster and putting him on a plane to Vegas.

Tangent #4: Putting the Frankenstein monster on a plane to Vegas.

The business plan for Las Vegas, wherein everyone can have free liquor, cheap food and the freedom to do WHATEVER they want, shows a tremendously insightful and pessimistic understanding of the human spirit. Most people focus on the freedoms that Las Vegas provides, but the far more interesting part is that all this is provided with a reasonable expectation of profit. Give people whatever they want and they will hand their money over willingly. It is that simple. Most of us live in a world of stifling routines and constant boundaries. Days blend together and disappear. We don’t give much thought to what we would do if we were completely free to do whatever we wanted. So we go to Las Vegas where it injects excess and decadence directly into our senses. Then it sits back and lets us do anything we want. Anything. Many a free man will make poor choices.

This point has always deeply attracted me to Las Vegas. Is there any bigger insult than being told you can do whatever you want by someone or something that is assuming you are going to screw it up? I have spent hundreds of hours learning how to count cards, as well as reading many books on poker, in a desperate attempt to prove Vegas wrong and show that I can beat the system, walk the edge, have my fun, and still not be a victim. Playing Las Vegas perfectly requires a delicate balance of greed, excess and restraint. Sometimes I have proved them wrong, and sometimes I haven’t, but it is always on hell of battle. Over the years I have seen a list of people make some pretty horrible choices in Vegas. We talk as though Vegas is to blame, but it isn’t. Vegas is just providing the ultimate forum for us to be ourselves. I go to Las Vegas to stand at the edge of myself and let go. Then I wake up, brush myself off, and disappear back into my routines like everyone else, but I am richer for the experience (metaphorically speaking if not literally).

In many ways, Las Vegas is a modern day Frankenstein’s monster. I stood in the club at 4:00 in the morning and marvelled how it ever came to be that humanity transformed a desert into this ridiculour power-sucking Roman orgy. You have to appreciate the human achievement, but you also have to fear it. There is danger in letting this many coiled up people break out of their routines, free to let their natural urges collide with one another.

Las Vegas, more than anywhere on the planet, hosts humanity’s all-important battle with itself. Reserved people lose all control, cheap people lose all of their money in a blink of eye, married people lose their spouses, etc. Otherwise progressive and evolved people come face to face with their caveman nature and make choices. Las Vegas encourages them too. It promises that what happens in Vegas will stay there, so it is OK to loosen yourself from social boundaries and be free. One by one, in a world with no rules or boundaries, we all draw our own lines, exercise our own restraint and determine who we really are.

Tangent #5: Passing the almighty buck:

Most people blame governments and big business for many of today’s problems. I have problems with this. Ultimately, big businesses spend millions of dollars trying to find what we want them to sell us. Governments (even the crooked ones) are ultimately responding to the demands of their people (in very different ways and for a host of different motives).
Human growth (as a whole) is a product of human demand. Each one of us are collectively responsible for what we demand from governments, our restaurants and our malls. We want cheaper widgets and more powerful cars. We want better food produced at an industrial pace. I certainly want these things, and I could go on and on.

Theory 19: Miraculously pulling it all together

If human demand is driving growth, than it is human demand that also must evolve. We are no longer living in a bottomless world and we all have to show some measure of restraint. I will be the first to admit that I refuse to accept Ms. Shelley’s warning: I want to create life; I want to progress; I want cooler gadgets and amazing technological change. I do not want to hold humanity back out of fear, though I will admit to being a little scared.

So I give you Theory 19: The only way we survive our own ambition and greed is to accept the burden that Dr. Frankenstein did not: We have to see our monsters for what they are and recognize how much power we truly have. Our boundaries are gone - we’ve outgrown them as a species. We can do anything now, and the planet is at our mercy. We are a drunken species on one hell of a bender in somewhere in the soul of Las Vegas. It is up to us to draw our own individual lines in the sand. One by one, each and every person must accept the importance of our individual choices, because together they move the species as a collective whole.

Tangent 6: Frankenstein’s other burden

It is of course the result of a common misconception that Frankenstein is a name synonymous with the monster and not with the Doctor. I suppose Doctor Frankenstein would have found some irony in this - the genius of his achievements are forgotten or ignored - all that matters is the monster that he created.

I just spent the better part of this theory casting our species as Dr. Frankenstein. What are the odds that we suffer the same lesson?

I would wager that Vegas has a line on that somewhere.

Update on Theory 19

My lazy, deteriorating brain seems to be making a small comeback of late, which means I am feeling a renewed enthusiasm for this project. I more or less kept the site afloat last year in the hopes that I would soon see the passion return. Hopefully I can keep some momentum going.

Theory 19 (wherein I get to talk about Las Vegas) is 75% complete and should be up by next week. Plus I have actually already started Theory 20.

Legitimate reason for optimism of just talk?

Place your bets.

Book of Mark Xmas Special Part 2: How the Book of Mark Saved Christmas from Charlie Brown

Many of you may not remember this, but Christmas was once a holiday on peril. It was a holiday that had lost its way. Then, to everyone’s relief, Charlie Brown came along in 1965 and delivered a Christmas special (sponsored by Coca-Cola – really) that reminded everyone that Christmas had become too commercial and was supposed to be about religion. The struggling holiday was saved. For you youngsters, that may seem ridiculous, but back in the old days this was exactly the kind of radical thinking that was needed. Try to think of it like the emergence of unions – it was critically necessary at the time but eventually became a lot more like a pain in the ass.

Nowadays, Christmas is in again in crisis. Religions are clashing, people are spending themselves into dangerous debt and toys have become so ridiculously cool that they pose a long term threat on reality in a Matrix-like kind of way. Most importantly, a lot of depressed people feel even more depressed at Christmas.

Well, here at the Book of Mark we have spent all morning trying to think of some clever suggestions. Here is how I would save Christmas:

1) It’s time to kill Santa once and for all.

Let’s face it – old men dressed in flaming red costumers, smelling of liquor and offering your children toys for sitting on their respective laps is not the kind of role model we should be advancing. It undermines everything else we tell our kids. I was having dinner with a friend who told me that their youngest daughter was terrified of Santa Claus and willing to forego gifts just to avoid having to meet him. That girl gets it. Why don’t we?

Why not fake a sleigh accident with a drunk driver and try to kill to birds with one stone?

2) Say “Happy Holidays” and not “Merry Christmas”

Seriously Christians, get over yourselves. If the idea of wishing someone a “Merry Christmas” is truly an effort to wish that person good tidings then why not say it in the way in the way does this best. This isn’t about Christmas being under attack, this is about all of us getting our God-groove on in any way we want. It’s not as though we are doing this to because people are offended by the word Christmas. Everyone has Christmas whether they are catholic or not. I recently learned from a Jewish friend that many Jews refer to Christmas as “Jew-movie day” and they all go to movies free from Christian babbling. This explains why the Jewish community was so far ahead of the rest of the world in panning the Godfather Part 3.

The point is, saying Merry Christmas isn’t offensive to other religions, it’s just that saying “Happy holidays” makes a point of including them. Isn’t that better? As a non-religious person, I envy all God-worshippers equally. It’s like the old saying “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”.

3) Bring Commercialization To The Next Level.

Everyone complains the Christmas has gone too commercial, just like Charlie Brown said. They emphasize how the onslaught of advertising has created a culture of accumulation whereby sharing time with your loved ones is all about spending more and more money on them.

Sure, that may seem true for you, but let’s take a broader look:

What about the people who are alone on Christmas? The people who have nobody to buy gifts for or to share a turkey with? I am not saying we need to feel sorry for them, I am saying that they represent a pretty big market. Why aren’t we marketing to them? Why aren’t we commercializing Christmas loneliness?

A simple example:

The divorced father who doesn’t get to see his kids on Christmas is sad. He is alone and he desperately wants to pass the time. He wanders to Swiss Chalet for a “Festive Meal” and then he walks around the stores for a bit, then he goes home and watches television to kill the evening. Sadly, all that is on are cheesy Christmas shows about the importance of family and the joy of Christmas. He is depressed; just as many other people are at Christmas. (Thus the popular though not technically true rumour that suicide rates are higher this time of year.)

Fear not, for capitalism can save him:

What if, instead of a festive meal, he had “The lonely Xmas special”. Instead of stuffing and cranberry sauce on the side he would get macaroni and cheese on the side with a little Mr. Noodle bowl to take home for later. When he wanders the stores he is pleasantly surprised to see that the porn shops are having a “Spank yourself through Christmas” sale where all kinds of wonderful new porn is available at seasonal prices. When he gets finished with that and turns on the TV, some of the channels have decided they will have a bigger market by catering to him. Instead of Christmas specials it’s a Shannon Tweed marathon.

These ideas are really just off the top of my head, but you get the point. Real commercialism would take of advantage of these untapped markets and not keep trying to cater only to the fictitious perfect Christmas family. Real commercialism knows where the money is. I can only assume that those firm ties between Christmas and religion are still holding us back. That damn Charie Brown. He swung the pendulum too far.

Well, I started with cartoons so I will end with cartoons: In the words of an animated cracker factory:

“Christmas is a family holiday, happy families. Maybe single people like Christmas, we don't know. Frankly, we don't want to know. It's a market we can do without.”

Happy holidays everyone. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

Theory 18: The Half-Finished Ballad of the Dreamer/Quitter

I had promised a theory on the laws of attraction but that one has now been moved to Theory 21. I think that I’d like to take a moment and look back at some ideas that inspired me when I was younger:

“Work hard.”
“Never give up.”
“Hang on to your dreams. Never let them go.”

All of us old people miss being young and idealistic. We loved that intoxicating delusional invincibility. Nonetheless, let’s be clear about a few things that us wise folk don’t bother mentioning aloud, but all quietly agree upon:

“In many cases working hard is vastly overrated.”
“Giving up can be a good idea when it turns out your goal was stupid in the first place.”
“Most importantly, when appropriate, have the courage and foresight to let go of your dreams. Cast them aside like a band-aid that’s starting to fall off by itself.”

I have read that one of the most common characteristics of tremendously successful business people is a singular obsession towards one topic. Good for them. I used to think that I fit this ‘mould’. I used to be singularly obsessed with being a rock star; Then I wanted to be a lawyer; Then a poker player; Then a good husband; Then a writer who updates his blog more than once every month. Instead, I became all of those things and less. I became a Dreamer/Quitter. To horribly misappropriate from a poet who found a fork in the road, I truly believe that that has made all of the difference.

Put another way: Your priorities are the most important decisions you have to make. I have found that as I get older, I get better at prioritizing. It would be silly for me to stick inflexibly to my old priorities. Futherless, often my priorities change due to unforeseen circumstances. Sticking with one idea of what my life should be would have closed me off from all kinds of wonderful (and wonderfully horrible) experiences. This is why I am glad to have had the courage to be the quitter that I never had the foresight to dream that I would be.

However, before I shout “Three cheers for quitters” from the rooftops (though in reality I usually lose interest by the second cheer), I want to take a moment to point out why a Dreamer/Quitter is vastly different from your average run of the mill quitter. Most people quit because they are scared, or they are lazy, or they lack the strength and determination to overcome barriers. These are not the quitters I am toasting today. A Dreamer/Quitter only gives up on his dreams for one very important reason:

The Dreamer/Quitter often quits on one dream because they find a new dream that they like better.

Therein lies Theory 18:

Dreams are like ‘rum and cokes’. We should cherish each one when it is with us, but we must not be afraid to accept when they are finished. We should just be smart enough to make sure that another one is on the way.

I have always been, and will always be a dreamer. The best dreamers have always been quitters. We get the most practice.