Ron Delaney Jr

Friday Morning FYI – 6/5/2015

June 5, 2015June 1, 2015 Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI, my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

This week’s FYI is a little ranty, and about the words others put right in our earholes, but we don’t hear:

How often we ignore what others tell us about themselves. I’m not talking about body language, tone, or any of that. I mean the WORDS that come out of people’s mouths. We hear but don’t accept, and then react like we’ve been slighted – angrily casting blame. We paint Rockwellian pictures, script elaborate scenes and monologues, and erect statuesque pedestals – all outside of someone’s confessed reality – and then cry like children burned by touching a scolding oven we were warned was hot.

If a serpent tells you it bites, it goddamn bites. Don’t cuddle with it thinking it lied about biting, or just doesn’t know itself, or won’t bite YOU. Leave it the hell alone.

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 5/29/2015

May 29, 2015May 28, 2015 Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI, my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

This week’s FYI is about the oft-times heavy impact of unrealized expectations:

No one can disappoint you. All anyone can do is fail to live up to expectations you set for them in your head. How and what you feel when that happens, and how you react, is on you, not them.

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 5/22/2015

May 22, 2015May 22, 2015 Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI, my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

This week’s FYI is all about being in tune:

Everything in the universe vibrates to a specific frequency, including you. Occasionally, you run into someone/something on the same frequency, and it’s calming and exciting at the same time – a harmony. Of course, that means you also spend time in disharmony with some people and things. What helps is taking a little time every day to make sure you’re in tune with yourself. How you do this (meditation/reading/a quiet walk/playing with a pet) is up to you.

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

If a tree can grow under a city train station

May 18, 2015May 18, 2015 Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Philosophical treatise on trees, life, and self-limitation in 3… 2… 1…

I’d just hopped off my train at Newark Penn Station and was walking along Platform A toward the far stairs – the recently rediscovered crooning of Alanis Morissette occupying my headspace. I happened to glance to my left and spotted, of all things, a tree.

Gorgeous, delicate bubblegum blossoms, gently-waving against the glowing yellow of abused safety rails and the broken reds of rusted tracks. And leaves, like green rips of skin, scattered across the mammoth gray spine of the station.

I kept walking, subconsciously aware of the crashing human wave rolling behind me – everyone rushing to get wherever their watches commanded them to be – but also reached for my phone. And then it was too late and I was in the stairwell, headed down to the marble shoebox that is the concourse, to go right back up to Platform 1 and the Path.

But I didn’t catch the Path. Not right away. I didn’t even try. I hopped the turnstile (because you’re locked-in once on the Path Platforms, apparently) over to Platform B, hustled back down to the concourse and back up to the now-deserted Platform A.

I took my phone out and took the above shot. And below shot. And several other shots, too. This was a few days ago. I needed time to think about why the tree effected me the way it did, calling me back to chronicle that moment rather than sleepwalking into my day. Here’s what I came up with:

Simply put, if a tree can grow under a city train station, what else is possible?

Or perhaps the question really is, what do I believe is possible?

We spend so much time limiting ourselves. “I can’t.” “I’ll never.” “There’s no way I could.” Tree seeds don’t believe that. They just know to grow – to flourish, even under the worst circumstances. Life doesn’t believe that, either. Where there’s even the smallest patch of earth, life is. And persists. And endures, without doubt or complaint. Like that stunning tree reaching toward the sky from beneath a smothering cage of iron and concrete.

If life, of which we’re all atoms, doesn’t believe in limitation, why should we?

Go be a tree.

Thanks for reading.

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 5/15/2015

May 15, 2015April 29, 2015 Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI, my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

This week’s FYI is all about keeping it simple:

If you ever wonder if you’re over thinking something, you are. Life is not nearly as complicated as we make it out to be. When it is, it’s because we’ve made it so. Just talk and listen. Especially listen.

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}