Oxford

          You know how when you were a small child and you somehow stepped into mud?  The mud rose up a little around your shoe and suction was created preventing you from just pulling yourself out.  No matter how hard you tried the mud held tight to your shoe.  If you struggled hard enough your foot came right out of your shoe.  In that particular tug-of-war the mud won.  It got to keep your shoe.

          I only mention this to help describe my life.  I am the shoe.  All of my life I have felt the struggle going on and I have somehow known the mud would win.  Nothing I did was ever going to change that.  No matter what job I had or how much or how little education I would receive in life nothing would change the fact that I was the shoe.  At some point I would be plunged into the thick of it and there I’d be.  Life would eventually pull free and hobble on without me.  The remainder of my days would be spent simply mired down along some unfortunate path.

          This blog is the sucking sound made as I make feeble attempts to pull free; to move on with things.  It is no great novel, no inspiring work of art.  It is simply the sound of me squirming about still trying to free myself even though Life has moved on. 

          You, on the other hand, are free.  You are free to think, to move about and travel though life with the wind in your hair, the phone poles and fences along the road stretch on forever as you give it more gas, taking in the scenery, exploring all that life has to offer.

          What is that?  You try to focus as you quickly come up on it. Ah – one shoe.  One lone shoe there in the road, somehow left behind, abandoned by its owner.  You make one final glance at it in your rear-view mirror and briefly wonder how it came to be there.  But you don’t slow; you speed along your way - soon exploring an entirely different blog, leaving this one behind, a little Sun-dried mud along its edges.