IMNOTQUITEJACK

By Dr. Kent M. Keith

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway. 

When visiting friends, I am notorious for leaving my clothes behind.  Despite my stubborn determination to stop doing this, it happened again last weekend when I left my coat behind at a vacation house.  After a day or two, I was contacted by the shadowy group that was holding my coat hostage.  An anonymous e-mail arrived with a brief message:

And then, later that day:

Interesting… Then:

I had no choice but to comply with this totally unreasonable request.  Chris, a nice waiter at Melting Pot helped me out.  (He preferred the arms-under hugging position.)

I hoped that this would appease the hostage takers.

Excellent!  I can practically feel the angel-soft microsuede of my beloved coat back in my arms.

Hug a MAILBOX?  How could I possibly comply?  I don’t have a mailbox!  In a panic, I ran through the streets of Concord, MA desperately searching for help.  Thank the sweet lord, I came upon a post office where some very nice women took my picture:

You’ll notice that I’m wearing my backup coat in this picture.

These bastards aren’t easy to please…

YES!  The Exchange would be imminent.  That same night, I was blindfolded and led to a dark room where I handed over a package of Hershey’s Hugs.  At long last, I got my beloved brown coat back, completely unharmed.  I’ll never again leave an article of clothing behind!

Our bodies are made of material that was forged in the cores of stars.

Our universe was initially composed almost entirely of Hydrogen and Helium, the lightest elements.  The only way to really form the heavier elements that are required for life (Carbon, Oxygen, Iron, etc) is through stars formation and subsequent explosive nucleosynthesis.  Huge clouds of hydrogen and helium coalesce over millions of years to eventually form stars.  In the cores of those stars, there’s enough heat and pressure that nuclear fusion fuses lighter elements into heavier elements.  Elements heavier than iron are created when the cores of stars reach supercritical mass and explode in supernovae.

Many think that much of the material on earth and in our bodies was created over the course of at least three “generations” of stars forming, exploding, and eventually forming again - perhaps as many as a dozen generations.

It took almost 10 billion years for the universe to create the materials that make life possible on Earth.  It took trillions of births and deaths over the last 3.5 billion years for humans to evolve from those raw materials.

There is an immense weight of history behind every cell in your body. Don’t take them for granted.