Hard Life Lessons

Warning signs we will encounter as we travel life's highway.
Hard life-lessons I've come to know only to well:

      Wrong association, inappropriateness, and the acting out in anger.
      Making wrong life decisions and choices.
     Failing to keep my thoughts and heart pure.
      Not embracing "that" which is life-enhancing and letting-go of "that" which is not.
      Not balancing work with play.
      Failing to to put systems in place.
      Not knowing what to let be or what I could not change.
      Not knowing when to refrain or abstain.
      Not being true to myself or with others.      
     Being mean-spirited or vindictive.
      Failing to prioratize.
     Not placing a value on my time.
      The inability to decern between right and wrong. (Black and white v.s grey.)
       Failing to take counsel or to ask for help.

Until learned the life-lesson will repeat itself.  
For same thinking only produces the same results.
The foolish, the nieve, the immature, and those who just don't care,
will know this only to well.

Take comfort in knowing, that on many occasions, I too...
have had to work the above through.
Sometimes succeeding - sometimes failing.
Sometimes alone and sometimes with you.

Some I discovered, in the way inwhich they live their lifes,
in itself become's a warning sign.
A warning-sign replaced, far earlier than it should be with a tombstone.

Timothy E.Stevenson  September 18, 1998      Upoet.com (I dedicate the above poem to my younger brother John. He drank, toked, and smoked himself to death and died at the age of 44. He liked to party. It was hard for me to watch over the years his gradual and deteriating heatlh. I remember coming home from school one day. John (age 13) was sitting with my father. Both were smoking and drinking and were drunk. They had just finished off a bottle of whisky. My mom, was at work. John began drinking and because of taking booze to school, was kicked out. The party girls loved John, but the landlords didn,t. He was consatntly being evicted. I failed him as an older brother. Maybe I can prevent someone else from dying prematurely . )