If you live long enough, you realize how lucky you are to have a family and friends.
But once you do, you also realize that you are responsible for their safety and joy.
Soon thereafter you also understand that your happiness is incumbent to theirs.
And once you get to that point, you start living vicariously through them.
Life, as it happens, is an exercise in the surrender of your natural rights to the pursuit of happiness as a salve for your ego. Each day starts with ensuring the welfare of your blood and close family. And it ends when you go to sleep knowing you achieved that for the time being.
Life begins and ends with making sure that your kin is as happy as they can be.
I wish we lived on a planet where each of us knew that to be true. There’d be more people content with keeping watch over their family and less of them spending their lives in dissolution, forever chasing the magic dragon of their own personal salvation through material gratification.
Enjoy Christmas, folks, and be good to one another!
Götterdämmerung 