Here’s my favorite obituary ever, clipped from an old issue of my hometown newspaper. ‘Buchart, Peter Wilhelm: Accidentally killed last Saturday when a bullet ricocheted while he was endeavoring to shoot a rabbit in his vegetable garden. Surviving are his wife, three children and one rabbit.’

(What would you like your newspaper to write about you?)

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I’ve been thinking about words today. I arise as the sun and the paper are being delivered, and, as soon as I am able to distinguish the one from the other, I wave at the one and get acquainted with the other. Then on to the keyboard, with only intermittent reprieves, until a part of me is sore and another bruised. I’m quite sure my own inarticulateness will only hasten a heart attack, and so you can find me morning, noon and night doctoring these bloody bits, assessing their effect and exercising the weak.

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Quick aside. I read somewhere recently the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for interesting. ‘Really!’ I thought, ‘Was everything interesting to them, or nothing at all?’

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As I think back to my childhood, then to my kids, I’m convinced it isn’t the words, and the lessons they meant to convey that take hold for a lifetime. Quite the opposite. I can’t tell you how many of those speeches I even heard, let alone those I’ve consciously determined to change with my kids. Yet what was never articulated have the most lasting power. The importance of quality time together, integrity in all exigencies, striving to be better tomorrow than today, and one that’s been growing in importance lately, at least one damn meal together each week.

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Just had a thought. The moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have really started to live.

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I’m now thinking I should simply endeavor to untangle, and keeping myself to a minimum of sentences which I myself don’t fully understand is to be my yardstick.

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Today’s word: epitaph. (What’s yours?)

Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit was given some sage advice: “Where should I begin, please your Majesty” he asked. “Begin at the beginning,” the King said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end, then stop.”

In the beginning there is free will. I am free to think and feel and be who I want to be. Do I want to feel abundance? Or scarcity?

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I can’t remember where I first read the following, but it popped into my head after a trying start this morning (more on this in a bit):

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In this space lies our freedom to decide how to fill it. In these choices lie our life.

I have decided that today I will find at least one moment with some stranger to perpetuate an act of kindness. Nothing major, just a simple little nothing.

I am not going to wait for a situation to present itself, such as holding a door or picking up a dropped set of keys. Nor can I recall the last time I saw an old lady trying to cross the street. (I live in somewhat open country, 5 acre minimum lot size, a land of SUV’s, soccer moms and absentee fathers, where the walking is done on treadmills in clubs, or dodging bicycles along the bike paths.)

Maybe I should step out of character, briefly. Walk into a place I’ve never been before. Many who think they know me think me orthodox, socially. They’ve seen nothing yet.

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“He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”

Pablo Picasso

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I had started out this post with sentence after sentence of vivid word pictures of men and women, birds and bees, seasonal changes, statistical matter, delicious links and brisk passages designed to stimulate and exalt. The computer crashed. I was bushed before I got anywhere. Then Lewis Carrol came to the rescue.

With no backup but a plan, I’ll end this with 2:00 YouTube kindness: This is Charlie. Pay it forward.