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By C.L. Harmon

1. Always take the steps, because the people who have to take the ramp, wish they didn’t have to.

2. Commas never killed anyone. When in doubt, use one.

3. Never be cruel to an animal. There just might be an angel in there reporting back to God.

4. No matter how bad someone may be, if that person is willing to pick up a broom and sweep without being told to, then redemption is a possibility for them.

5. Legality is a concept of man, morality is one of God. They are not always the same, so choose your master wisely.

6. Always open a window when you can. Nature speaks and spoke to all the worlds’s inhabitants until man created doors and windows to keep it out.

7. Never minimize someone else’s experiences. Their world may not be the same size as yours and so their problems and triumphs are not an equal comparison to yours.

8. Kindness to others is a signed blank check that awaits you in the future.

9. Dreams either drive you, die because of you or thrive as you choose to live them.

10. Always believe in something greater than yourself. Beyond you is where the rest of everything else lies.

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C.L. Harmon

Learn About Another Culture

It sounds like something most would care nothing about. The truth is however, learning about another culture and people is one of the greatest teachers in life. Even if we had the means, most of us will never get to travel the world. But many of us do get the opportunity to vacation and learn a little outside of our daily bubble. For most everyone else, there is the internet and its vast knowledge at our disposal. Without a doubt, we carry something away from each experience that brings us in touch with those from other cultures. These opportunities affect us in a way that would not have been possible had we not experienced something different.

Learning about others and how they live is pure enlightenment. It allows us the opportunity to understand better the choices others make because we can see what challenges they face. We also experience how they overcome those challenges as well as learn how they define happiness in-spite of their hardships. Learning about other cultures is truly a window into another world. It is extremely difficult to feel prejudice and hatred when confronted with knowledge that contradicts what we think we know. Two things will happen when you take the time to learn about another culture; the first is that you will realize that you are more like others than you ever thought. The second is, others will learn they are more like you than they ever thought.

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Life is an experience in value where the income is often less than the outcome but the value always out weighs the cost.

~C.L. Harmon

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C.L. Harmon

Engulf Yourself In A Thunderstorm

There is immense and awesome power in a thunderstorm with lightning that cracks the sky and the thunder roaring in ferocity. It is an opportunity to bow before nature and be humbled by its force. Knowing that it can become a force of destruction instantaneously awakes our senses and reminds us of the voloatility all around us.

But more than this, is the experience of watching a storm brew, build, execute its will and then fade into nothingness. In each of these phases we feel something different. Feeling the wind pick up and the temperature drastically change, witnessing the sky darken and the clouds moving as though being pushed by invisible forces fills one with a childlike curiosity as to what is coming. And when the storm reaches its potential and releases its force, a sense of terror grips. In that moment, we are powerfully reminded that occasionally in life we are at the mercy of what we cannot control and defiance of this changes nothing. But, regardless of the outcome of the storm, we are reminded that everything changes and passes and that peace always returns in nature and with humanity.

Pull up a porch swing and let Mother Nature entertain you!

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It takes nothing more than willful ignorance to be led as sheep to slaughter.

C.L. Harmon

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So this idea occurred to me the other day about writing on experiences I believe express what give us a clear understanding of what life can give and teach us when we accept them for what they should be. Over the course of the next few months, I will will post these and hopefully help you see that even the simplest of experiences can give us so much. Once I have completed publishing 100 of these experiences, I will make these available in an ebook. Please feel free to post on these.

C.L. Harmon

1. Ride In Something At Over 100 MPH

Of course I mean with someone and something safe and not with your 19 year old cousin who just had the engine rebuilt in the 1981 Trans Am he bought from Craigslist. There is something thrilling that happens in the body and the brain when we go fast, an excitement that seems overwhelmingly enjoyable. It’s fear, rebellion and an odd sense of joy all rolled up together. The power of a precision machine that lifts us into the air or sucks us to the ground is to release all control and exit the mundane if only for a few seconds.

It becomes easy to get comfortable in a presumed state of safety, to avoid what is mentally intoxicating in our quest for self-preservation. And though we survive in our cocoons of security, we do only that, survive. Take a ride on the wild side if but only once. Allow yourself to let go of everything and experience the freedom of having no control.

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C.L. Harmon

I like history. But more importantly, I like history the way it is. Does this mean that I am proud of all that has been done throughout human history? Of course not. But I am grateful for what we learned from the actions of those who came before us. Many of those actions have been heroic and honorable and many have been destructive and evil. Whatever they might have been in nature, they were lessons in what propels us forward and what holds us back, what saves us and what destroys us.

Every action leaves residue, a mark or an imprint in time that may be forgotten but never erased.  Below the sediment, oceans and dense jungles are buried cultures of who we once were as human beings moving through existence one day at a time. And each subsequent generation picked up the broken pieces of their present left behind from the past to forge a new future. It is our nature to take the past and learn from it. It is our hubris which prevents us from doing so.

Throughout our existence, we have righted so many wrongs and changed multiple unfair practices. We have honored many of those who fought against tyranny and injustice and taught civility and patience between peoples and government. We have done so because of what the past has taught us when we don’t pursue these actions. We were what was chosen in the past, but we are now what we choose today only because we already know who we have been. We can be the best parts of the past by understanding that the best elements of humanity are sprinkled throughout history and given as a gift to each new generation.

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C.L. Harmon

On August 6, 1945 President Harry Truman authorized the atomic bombings of Japan, first Hiroshima and Nagasaki three days later. His intention was to end the war in the Pacific and bring an end to the loss of American servicemen fighting against a determined enemy who refused to accept defeat.
His efforts succeeded at the cost of 230,000 civilians killed or injured by the heat waves that reached several thousand degrees. Time would inevitably take many more lives as a result of radiation exposure before the effects would level off. Past generations have and future generations will continue to judge the moral scope of President Truman’s decisions. But perhaps it is not his choice we should question but rather the choices our children will have to face in the future. The ones in a world that continues to move into a volatile state where weapons of mass destruction, far greater than those used against Japan, are ever more prevalent and still seen as an alternative to bring about peace.

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By C.L. Harmon

There is no easy. Easy is a word to describe what we want, not what is real. In truth, reality is synonymous with difficulty. In other words, life is hard. It matters not what we do. Life is designed in nature to be arduous. Why should anything be easy? What is learned or gained from that which takes no effort, no drive, no discipline? There is no reward in easy. There is no appreciation for what is given that should have been earned. There is no pride in what needs to be accomplished but is not. There is no work ethic in sloth and no lasting reward for what is unjustly taken.

Gardens do not grow simply because you throw seeds in the soil. Children are not raised by simply feeding and clothing them. Of all things in nature which must work for their nourishment and fight to survive, why is it humanity expects easy and does not expect challenges and embrace what value they bring forth?

Even what is created in life to make life easier has strings attached. Typing is easier than writing, but one must first learn to type and then there is the learning the intricacies of what one uses to type. Although it is easier, there is still difficulty. Technology arguably makes life more comfortable, enjoyable, and organized, but even these come at the cost of more stress keeping up with the everchanging advances in order for these advances to be effective. In the end, what makes life easier is the acceptance that everything is a challenge with varying degrees of effort to overcome. And that easy is a word used by those who do not wish to accept life’s challenges.

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C.L. Harmon

When we live without reason we exist without freedom. Chaos captures us when what is on the outside influences us more than what is on the inside.
It seems probable that we are programmed to some degree during our creation. Little adjustments or additions that make some right-handed while others are left or allows for one person to be shy why others seem naturally comfortable around people or an adjustment that even makes some more creative while leaving others with little talent for the arts at all.
Based upon this belief, it would seem likely that other additions or adjustments were made at the same time. Perhaps a conscience or some moral code that is woven within the fiber of our being to help us along as we make our choices in life. When we distance ourselves from that internal set of rules and sense of what is right and begin living without the benefit of those rules, chaos begins to track and then imprison us.
Words that are corrupt, actions that cause turmoil and desires that destroy are done without the benefit of reason and thus bring chaos to peace, captivity to those free. These words and actions limit us thus imprisoning us within their consequences. They lock us into a dark existence away from joy, compassion and, enlightenment. Reason is the fundamental key to understanding each other and each time we use it, we unlock a bit of humanity within ourselves allowing the universe to grow exponentially, expanding our realm in which to experience even more freedom.

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