The Ugly

The good, the bad, and the ugly; that’s how I’ve occasionally rated relationships. It is easy to lay out the territory on the bad and the ugly – people who abuse you, use you and leave scars. 

An unfairly large percentage of time gets spent discussing them while you sit at the bar on a lonely night. The sand in the hourglass seems to run out faster as closing time approaches, and that mellow glow you hoped for at the start of the night, well, it never really developed past the first strike of the match on the matchbook cover. In frustration, you toss the match, the matches, and your hopes for the evening away with a resigned shrug.

Out in the night you go, collar up against the rain. Where the hell did you leave that damned hat?

Have you had nights like that? Me too. By contrast, the good are much less dramatic and more subtle in their effects on your psyche. We have to school ourselves to treasure them because the drama involved in the negative is so powerful it can pull us off center.

Sometimes, it takes an actual act of willpower to choose the light over the dark. And if you’ve been through a lot of darkness, you may need to retrain your feelings to accept it. 

Remember what Francis Drake said: ” Great things have small beginnings.”