Paddling a canoe can create a meditation-like atmosphere. This world provides the calming music --  the sound of the river flowing, the  birds chirping, and the faint distant sound of a car on a gravel road now and then.  As the constant paddling provides motion for the brain to focus on, I slowly slip into a contemplative state.

"118," is what we yelled our first year in college together. It was the number of the room my goofball friends gathered in most days. Zach was part of this group, so Zach used to be a daily part of my life. He might have been the one who invented our game of putt-putt golf in the dorms that year; it was him or Braden.

Emotions transcend language, race, tribe, abilities, disabilities, and socio-economic status. I am not breaking any new ground with this information. Most people know this by now, but it just seems that this type of knowledge is thrown away, not accepted, or downright refused-to-be-acknowledged by the world

Give any of one of the owners' truth serum, and they wouldn’t have cared about the kneeling if the ratings, sponsorship dollars, and the number of fans went up. When money is your moral compass, you have failed as a human being.

It's a scary thought, being placed in a situation which you do not know how to access. The natural thing to do is to operate out of fear and run from it, make fun of it, and demoralize it, by calling them "animals".

Everyone made this choice consciously: to ditch being good for the chance of being adored as excellent by their audience. In the pursuit of fame, power, and a lot of money they applied character and accountability as mere makeup.

Either people pick up on the fact that you are only there for selfish reasons, or, they find out later. Either way, you have destroyed your credibility and any changes or improvements they had made based on your advice crumbles.

"Rebellions are built on hope." Hope evokes an emotional response that communicates to us even in the face of insurmountable odds. We have to believe there is a reason to fight back.