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Two nights ago, I was told by someone I know that life is a question mark, that you can never be sure what's going to happen next, that it's one big mystery.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh...

I'll give her that you can never be totally sure of anything, but at the same time, she's making it sound like Mario Kart, where you get hit by lightning or tracked down by a turtle shell at least once every 60 seconds.  Now, I don't know all that much about what's going on with her, but I can honestly say that none of those things have ever happened to me.

Milwaukee, apparently

There are unknowns.  There are lots of unknowns.  In fact, there are very few knowns, and that's even if you count high probability assumptions, such as surviving the morning drive to work.  These things are scary, some are terrifying, some make us stay awake at night, some make us doubt ourselves, and some seem insurmountable.  In no way am I saying that there aren't question marks in life, but that doesn't automatically make life a question mark.  We give out question marks when we run out of our own options, either when we don't have any ideas left or when we don't care enough to find out by ourselves.  Is that really what we want to reduce life to?

Let's pretend that

Clay Matthews

is chasing you down.

What do you do?  Well, you, you scared little ball carrier you, have options.
1. Stand still
2. Run at him
3. Try to avoid him
That's pretty much it.  Now, there's a great chance that by doing any of these three things you're going to get clobbered, but at least in the second two you are in control of your own destiny.  If you try to avoid him, you have a chance to get away.  If you run at him and initiate contact, you have some control of where the hit's happening.  If you stand there and leave it up to him, they'll have to peel you out of the Frozen Tundra.

This isn't something that a positive attitude can solve.  This is something that only effort and passion and hope can solve. 

"Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things, and no good thing ever dies"

A positive attitude wasn't going to get Andy DuFresne out of Shawshank.  A positive attitude won't save your teeth if Clay Matthews is running at you.  A positive attitude only works when coupled with hope, which my dictionary defines as "a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen."  Key word there?  Expectation.



If we wait to see what the scary things are going to do to us, even if we have the best of attitudes, they will inevitably do something other than what we want, and while it may never result in us face-down in the Lambeau Field turf, it could cause other things that are just as bad emotionally, if not physically.  On the other hand, if we take that fear and channel it, and decide that we're going to do something about it and keep it in our own hands, we can do absolutely no worse, and a lot of the time we can do a lot better.  If we expect to come out ahead and we act like it, if we expect to break out of that prison and do something about it, if we expect to juke out that linebacker and start making some moves, there's a chance that we will, but if we sit around and wait to get hit by the scary unknown, the best case will never happen.  Clay Matthews doesn't miss tackles.  Shawshank doesn't let guys out because they feel bad for them.

We need to be bold, we need to expect excellence in the hopes that we will only fall as low as success, and we need to live life as an exclamation point, not a question mark.  Exclamation points accomplish their purpose!  Aren't question marks just waiting to get eliminated?