All You Need Is...

McCartney and Lennon once wrote, "All you need is love..."  So it got to me thinking as we go into the new year, what is it that is all that I need?  A number of years ago I saw an article in my local paper about people who were downsizing their homes, living in prefab, 400 square foot homes that, from the outside, looked like nothing more than a kids play house, but these were fully functional, but small houses.  It made me contemplate the practicality of that for a while.  That’s when I first started thinking about what it is that I really need?

I took a brief vacation by myself back in May and hung out at a friend’s house in the NC mountains.  Every day I got up and went fishing, wading in streams, or standing on the banks of a nearby lake, and I thought then, this is all I really need.  The only thing missing was my wife, and of course my kids for occasional visits, but when I got down to the very basics, I needed very little.  I needed shelter, food – I didn’t cook anything elaborate, rather I ate sandwiches and heated some soup – and a fishing pole and some water in which to fish.  Throw in a book or two and the company of my wife, and I’ll be set for life.  So I ask, what do you need?

Dickens

Miscellaneous Musings

This is my first attempt at a blog and I intend to use it simply as an outlet to write, rant, rave, complain, compliment, praise, or express whatever may be on my mind at any given time.  I hope that I may find some followers out there, and I welcome feedback on my posts.  I don’t really know what to expect or where this blog may go – I suspect it may follow the path of the wind and scatter my thoughts, or perhaps just show how scattered my thoughts already are!  So with that in mind, I hope that anyone out there who happens across this page may find it enlightening at times, or that it invokes opinions from others, or maybe just that it provides some entertainment or a place to find that others sometimes think crazy thoughts as well.  So here goes:

A day after Christmas and I am amazed at how fast the days seem to sweep by anymore.  I remember being a kid and thinking that Christmas would never get here.  The excitement, the anticipation made the wait almost unbearable.  I would find myself counting down the days, and sometimes even the hours until Christmas Eve, the most magical night of all the nights of the year.  But now that I’m much older, the Christmas season, which I still love, seems to be a blur.  We, or at least I, seem to have so much going on in my life, that I rarely have the time to just sit back and enjoy the season.  Oh, I don’t wish it away and I still love Christmas and look upon it as the most wonderful time of the year, to borrow a phrase, but I don’t seem to have the time to enjoy it the way that I used to, or the way that I want to.  I know that many will say that I’ve lost sight of what it’s all about, and to an extent I’ll agree, but the mere fact that my life has become much more complicated than I ever imagined that it could be, and I would suspect there are a lot of others out there who feel the same way, causes me to seem to be always on the move, always having something important that has to be done, leaving me little time to just enjoy.  I long for that carefree attitude I had as a child when my biggest concern at Christmas time was whether I was going to get the Redskins toboggan or the felt Redskins jacket with the gold vinyl sleeves.  Everything else was just stuff that got in the way.  Gosh, I miss that kid!