What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown

Reality can never live up to the shining edifices we forge inside our fantasies: Life, in all its confusing complexity, is destined to be a disappointment in comparison.

Things change; you start out thinking you know everything about someone and eventually you realize you know nothing

Listening to one voice, and one voice only, doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a parrot.

But if there’s one thing I understand at this point, it’s that life isn’t always a series of binary choices. Sometimes it’s not about either/or but about learning how to manage the complexities of both/and.

I believe that civilization’s path is a pendulum that swings both ways, vacillating between hope and despair, success and failure, and all we can do is hang on for dear life.