STRONG AT THE BROKEN PLACES

The world breaks everyone.
And afterward, some are strong
at the broken places.
              Earnest Hemingway, "For Whom The Bell Tolls"


Perhaps you believe that life in Homeless Nation does not make a change in the phyche of a Streetpuppy.

And if you believe that, then you have not lived here, and are only reading this because you are interested in how Streetpuppies really do live, or you downloaded the wrong column onto your Amazon kindle. or you googled 'puppy' because it is time to give your two year old  kid something to do that will build character.

Or you may believe that living in Homeless Nation , and navigating all of the perils and ill will and savagry and heartache here will build one's character.

Au contraire. Living in Homeless Nation will reveal  one's character. But nothing that happens to a Street Puppy in Homeless Nation will help to build their character. 

One's character is pretty much wired in by the time one has navigated the other heartaches and perils in life, like getting through the first broken romance, without chewing off your own eyebrows, or deciding what you really want to do with your life that your parents don't want you to do, and then doing it, come hell or high water, or wasting a lot of money on some foolish piece of automobile, then realizing you really don't care for the kind of women who are primarily interested in your car, and then doing something about it, like  selling the spicy money trap and buying a beater and saying,'to hell with it, it's just a car.'

Those life trials, and others like them build character, and by the time you've hit Homeless Nation, you are probably old enough to have had the rite of passage through just about every seemingly earth shaking event that stands in your way to Nirvana.

And how one handles the truly life shaking events which will occur in your time in Homeless Nation will not only reveal your character to yourself and to others, but will determine how you come out at the other end of the journey.

So, let's say you have built up some character in your life account.

You had a master plan and it seemed to be working before you got here, and now the whole world fell onto your head, and a lot of things in your life are broken.

You will be tempted to succumb to the most devious and harmful and spiteful ways to navigate through the Nation, they will, be the seemingly easiest and fastest way out of it. 

And you will observe that so many of the residents of Homeless Nation use those devious and harmful and spiteful ways to navigate through the Nation, and then you will notice that those ways don't seem to be getting them out of it.

So you don/t go that route.

You stick it out, and you are honest and you avoid the drug and alcohol trap and you don't steal even if your life seems to depend upon it.  And you don't hurt anybody for the sake of building your own ego. Or betray the few real friends you may make here.

But.

You have been damaged.  No doubt about it, the experience of Homeless Nation will bruise your very soul.

You have been broken, and eventually, the bone of life will grow over that wound and whatever part of you that broke under the sometimes unbearable pressures here, will stand up to future assaults in the same place.

No, you will never be the same person.

You will be the person who has learned that nothing in life is certain, including life itself.

And that knowledge alone will make each and every day after the experience in Homeless Nation priceless, and worth the price of the ticket you punched to get here.

And who ever told you that giving a two-year old a puppy would help to build his or her character???