Syllabus for Life

"There is beauty all around us. Every cloud, every leaf, every drop of water clinging to grass in the early morning, is beautiful. We need only open our minds to recognize it."
-Tadhg Craig

So yea, blogging. I'm new to this, so let's try and get through this awkward first post. Look at this like the first day of class. I'll lay out my "syllabus," and after this it will be amazingly poetic and intelligent writing only.

(That was a joke - There will be plenty more awkward posts to come!)

Before I can really begin this blog, though, I need to define the purpose. Some people blog to get things off their minds, some to share useful tips with others about some hobby or another. Still others blog as a kind of journal, recounting each day minute by minute, each intimate thought after the other. That's not what Sheep in the Wolf Pack is about. This blog is a little different.

Now, bear in mind that I have not gone through every blog out there (I went through quite a few, trying to find an open domain name), so there may very well be another blog with my purpose as well. What I say to that is: awesome! If you like what you find here, you might as well get double the cool content by reading two blogs.

But on to the purpose.

Our world (to be cliché) is quite pessimistic, and becoming increasingly more so. It seems as though the news loves covering violent and disheartening events. Many of these we should be informed of, but that doesn't diminish their discouraging nature. Every day we hear about more rapes, murders, shootings, terrorist threats, etc. People are mean, and they do mean things.

But not everyone is! In fact, nobody is completely bad. I would go so far as to say there are no bad people, just people that do bad things (which is all of us). So, if nobody's inherently evil, and nobody spends all their time doing evil things, there must be some good things out there, right? I'll let you in on a little secret...

There is a lot of good out there!

Even though they can be mean, people are actually quite nice and generally well intentioned. People still hold the door for each other, they still smile and say hello to each other, and I'm sure somewhere, in some obscure 1950s like neighborhood in suburban America, someone still loans a cup of flour to their neighbor.

And it gets even better! There is good in people, and there is good in everything else too. Like I said above, all we need to do is find it.

That's really what I'm getting at (yes, the whole point I just developed is what Tadhg said in the first line. I suppose you could have skipped to this line and understood everything still...). The point of Sheep in the Wolf Pack is to recognize the beauty in people, things, and events. As the description says, I am an idealist. However, I do in fact live in the real world. I pay bills, I get criticized, I get mocked, and I see the same things happen to others around me. However, I am still an idealist. My quest (mission? objective? purpose? goal?) is to bring a little optimism back into the world, one blog post at a time.

So wipe the metaphorical smudges off your doom-and-gloom glasses (and any smudges off your actual glasses, should you have any) and get ready to see the world through new eyes!