Mr. Black is Causing Me to Stumble

I'm kind of an attention whore.

But, I think I got a little bit of an explanation as to why today. Remember that whole 'do unto others' thing?

I received an amazing bit of encouragement from the people I work with today. We had our Admissions' Winter Retreat and spent the day at Tilikum (a.k.a. Greatest Place on Earth) basically alternating between extreme silliness and intentional relationship culitvation. Despite the fact that we were on retreat for 8 solid hours I am genuinely tired.

The piece that will forever hang in my mind is when we broke into small groups to encourage one another. The process started by each person sharing a story of a time in our lives where we felt proud of who we were. Then, the other people in the group would drop three words of encouragement on the person who just shared. After I told my story, the words that fell upon me were some conglomeration of 'makes people feel important', 'willing to help', and 'listener'.

Then, as the person showered in love, we had to pick one of those ideas and introduce ourselves to the group. I tried to paraphrase a few of the thoughts and I said, "Hi, I'm Justin, and I pay attention to people."

One of the ladies I work with decided that was not good enough. "No, no, Justin. I would definitely say it is more of a valuing that happens. You value people."

Hi, I'm Justin. And, I value people.

Do unto others... Attention whore... kinda makes sense, right? Basically: show me some love. I promise I'll show it back.

Incredible. Today is the first day of Lent... I'm having reconstructive knee surgery in less than 36 hours... I turned twenty-five a week ago today... And yet, three little words are what this blog is focused around. In the end, I guess it's more important as to how you got somewhere than where you end up.

Damn, I wrote a great paper in high school about how the ends justified the means.

In related news: I'm re-reading the first book I've re-read in a long time. I don't re-read things very often. There's always so much more that I want to start that I don't want to take time to read something I've already been through once. But, there is one book that made me break that rule: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

I don't intend on breaking out into one of my many rants about how it's the greatest work of fiction every produced (but, it is). The idea that I want to focus on is that I've stalled in my re-reading. I turned a page yesterday while I was at the end of a exercise bike ride in the gym and realized that I'd finally come to the introduction of my favorite character. I wanted to give my full attention to every page that Mr. Black occupied in the novel, so I closed the book and finished my ride.

That was yesterday. I've had two or three chances since then to sit down and begin those pages (including right now, actually...) and I've not been able to do it. No time feels right. It needs to be perfect.

Am I putting off the ends? Is this part of the means? Will I ever know happiness?!