I am finally warming up. The water was so cool and crisp today, the afternoon sun felt so good, and paddling into this perfect surf, reminded me just how good life can be. I felt blessed today; drunken happiness,  the feeling of being surrounded for 2 weeks by such loving and supportive family, my mom, dad, cousins, and mother and father in law. Our daughter too, is so lucky to be loved by so many people. I am hoping that this year will be better than last, not really because of the year itself, but maybe just my attitude, I am hoping to let go of some of the worry, and embrace each day for what it is: an opportunity to experience life, I hope to move my center of attention away from my thoughts and find a deeper place, a place that comes so alive when I am doing those things in life that have real meaning. How do I know which ones they are. Simple; they allow me to feel at peace.  It is that feeling I get when I share a smile with a stranger, kiss my wife for the thousandth time, hold my daughters hand, catch up with an old friend…… It seems cliché to say the best things in life are free, but the best things in life “ARE” free. It is these things that keep me going to work every day, waking up in the morning and believing in the goodness of people. Despite the horror that life at times can conjure.

Woody Allen in an interview on NPR in June said it well:
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Mr. WOODY ALLEN (Filmmaker): (As Alvy Singer) There’s an old joke. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says boy, the food at this place is really terrible. The other one says yeah, I know, and such small portions.

Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life, full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

TERRY GROSS (the interviewer): So, may I ask, what are some of the real problems that making movies distracts you from?

Mr. ALLEN: Well, they distract me from the same problems that you face or that anyone faces, you know, the uncertainty of life and inevitability of aging and death, and death of loved ones, and mass killings and starvations and holocausts, and not just the manmade carnage but the existential position that you’re in, you know, being in a world where you have no idea what’s going on, why you’re here or what possible meaning your life can have and the conclusion that you come to after a while, that there is really no meaning to it, and it’s just a random, meaningless event, and these are pretty depressing thoughts. And if you spend much time thinking about them, not only can’t you resolve them, but you sit frozen in your seat. You can’t even get up to have your lunch.

So it’s better to, you know, distract yourself, and people distract themselves creatively, you know, in the arts. They distract themselves in business or by following baseball teams and worrying over batting averages and who wins the pennant, and these are all things that you do and focus on rather than sit home and worry.
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A bit depressing but in so many way’s true!  Woody, I wouldn’t of said it this way, but I couldn’t of said it better myself, so I won’t!