Never forget the people who care for you: and I do mean the people who
*genuinely* care for you as a person, as a friend, as something more.
These people are really few and far between.

The contrast of this is: do not waste time on the people who do not care for
you: the people who only seem to *use* you; it seems like a restatement
of our natural being for me to tell you to pay no mind to the people who are
only there at chance opportunity or at their convenience when they might
find some use of you. What are you to them? A tool?

The most unfortunate thing of all this: such people never *intend* to
exploit you at all. They never *intend* to only show up when they want
something; they never *intend* to be nothing more than shallow-stream
friends: it simply happens that way.

For such men and women, I fear it's only a part of their unconscious, their
back-burner personality, that drives them to put left in front of right in
front of left until they reach you, little you, the solution to all
their inconvenience of the moment!

Unfortunate surely, but you can not blame them for their nature. Men and
women living their life on auto-pilot and hardly thinking of anything
outside the cockpit are hardly to blame for being such bad pilots. So the
only solution I've come to understand is to toss them like little dolls
in the other bin, right next to that one which is the handful of people
you care about the most.

Verily and every day I walk among people who aim to exploit my generosity
and kindness so much that I have learned to extend it only carefully. But
still I do not hesitate to do so with those I love: the people who
fundamentally care for *you*, they are the ones with whom you should
spare no expense of time nor effort, make every opportunity to see and
always remind them they, too, are important.

Such importance do we only have the capacity to bestow upon a few people;
it may be hard to pick out the people you *can't* trust, but as for
those you can: you'll know them beyond any doubt; I certainly do.

Sometimes it is hard, I know from mine own experience, to juggle all these
things. If there is any familiar feeling which has crept into me these four
years it has been that feeling of *juggling*. But once you've had
the experience (because that's not something you'll ever come to master) to
balance your work, life, play, pleasure can be quite rewarding.

Yea, there are many days where I would rather quit out and shrug it off
completely, but the days where someone, anyone, would remind me that it's
not all bad, that it's just over the hill, that they're there for me and
that they *truly care* for me, even in my darkest, that's what bubbles
forth laughter and tears, tender boy-ish emotion from within my being.

I can tell you that these days and weeks of the past month-and-a-half have
not been the easiest; sometimes it got to me, I'd lose sight of what's
really important to me and I'd scarcely break the threshold
of my house before everything collapsed on the faux-tile entrance. But I
feel a little better having come to this piece of understanding, this
sudden outcrop on the morning-trail.

Speaking of hiking, I cannot tell you how deeply woven into my fabric are my
8 or 9 years with the Boy Scouts; having spent so many weekends of my deep
boyhood with such good company from Tenderfoot to Eagle, I can't tell you
what a different person I would be without that experience. I had a dream
about hiking with them all again the other day, just as it had always been
on those few long weekends every Fall and every Spring all those feelings
suddenly came rushing to the front of my mind.

The cold winds of the long nights on Carolina's stretch of the Applachain
train; understanding self-reliance and compassion; there is nothing I can
attribute more to this feeling which cornerstones this length of writing
more than the experience which rushed to the front of my mind the other day.

It's gotten rather late; as much as I would rather stay up and pour my heart
out exploring these feelings I should hit the hay sooner rather than later.
I hope you get the chance to explore yourself (aside from some shallow sense
of the word) truly sometimes. In those idle moments you should learn to
reclaim your time. What good does having a phone in your face all the time
do for if you're not using it? Do you ever ask what's standing in your way?
Or is it too scary to even ask? Ask: reply with the full weight of your soul.