The biggest mistake we can make in our lives is not making enough mistakes.

A good teacher (besides Life itself) explained to me this month that we are all politicians.

When I was a teenager, my step father was a Member of the Legislative Assembly, of New Brunswick. I have always been proud of his accomplishment in becoming MLA. I've always respected the fact that he pursued what he felt was important but I didn't and don't necessarily agree with his particular politics.

That said, I don't think of him as the P-word [pssst you know: politician]. To my mind the word politician denotes a liar, someone out for themselves, riding on the shoulders of the people. In that vein of thought I never conceived of myself as having potential to be or of being a politician either.

Now assuming this bit about how we are all politicians, is true, if every interaction we have with another human being is indeed a political act, well sir, I have been a terrible politician indeed.

After all, if my teacher is to be believed, a politician's role is to lead in an attempt to control and resolve conflict. They have to be able to push an agenda. Except for my dad and a few rare others, I always thought of politicians as hypocrits. How can a person believe and say one thing and do another? Well now!

So worried have I always been about how everyone might feel about things and so difficult it's always been for me to see any one choice in things above another, that I've always had a difficult time stating my own case. Often I have a hard time even figuring out what my case is.

The greatest revelation in all of this to me is that my not being willing or often not capable of picking a side, has been my greatest downfall and has been perceived as a lack ambition and lack of character. This came as somewhat of a shock to me. I had always seen my ability to empathise as a strength. Indeed an empathetic parent is a good thing but an agent in the universe, in need of leaving a positive mark on the world, must pick a side therefore choices are necessary. By not making a choice I have often made the worst choice of all.

In the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to do something that I've never really felt at Liberty to do. I've had the chance to drive around and take wrong turns in a new town, in this case two towns that I have visited but really don't know them very well, Woodstock and Oromocto. Sometimes I took the same wrong turn (haha several times) over but eventually I learned which turn was the right one.

Here's the point: Unless her choices run parallel, a woman has to be impossibly flexible to walk down more than one path at a time. In life we have to pick a path, pursue it with all we've got, and do our best to learn from getting lost.

A girl I know is a good, kind-hearted, well-meaning young idealist who happens to inhabit the same building as a bunch of other young people, who all happen to be young men, who (although they may well be kind and good hearted themselves) are not quite so considerate concerning a particular habit.

Now fortunately for my young friend she does not have to share a bathroom with the young men. She also has her own room and due to strict rules in this house there's not a lot of visitor traffic or music late at night. No parties in the house either.

All these rules suit my young friend just fine but there is one thing in particular that is really getting on her nerves: the boys are constantly cussing. My friend is particularily bothered when they take the Lord's name in vain. I mean this REALLY bothers her.

Personnally there are many many habits that would really annoy me faster than cussing, being a few years her senior, I learned a long time ago, boys will be boys and there's not much you can do about their language use. My young friend, however has not learned that lesson.

She repeatedly (probably to their great annoyance) has asked that they stop using those words but (surprise, surprise) her efforts come to no avail and every day she's more frustrated with them. But what can a person do, really? My most sage advise comes from a prayer I remember repeating as a child: accept that which cannot be changed. But apparently that's not her style. I suggested she look for another place to live, one that might be a better fit for her sensibilities.

No she likes the location and her rent is paid several months in advance.

Understanding human nature in a way she clearly doesn't and slightly apathetic about her plight I advised her to do one of two things:

1. Either get more creative than simply harping at them;

2. OR back off a little because they may gang up on her and start playing nasty tricks like scrubbing the toilet with her toothbrush. Just ignore them, as my mother used to say.

The following day she had employed the Silent treatment accompanied with door slamming. I'll admit this sounded a little childish to me BUT (and this really was a surprise to me) it got results! Within the day she received a text from one such room-mate: "Please say something," it read.

While it may not seem like much she definitely got their attention which was more than I would have expected.

While boys may well indeed be boys and bound to mischief they are also hardwired to please and protect the women in their lives. And at the risk of generalizing nothing is harder or more confusing for a man to deal with then realizing that a woman is mad at them.

Koodos to my young friend for keeping in mind who or what she was dealing with.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

John Howard Payne
US actor & dramatist (1791 - 1852)

We've taken to calling it The Money Pit.

This is the main door to the house my great grandfather built in 1923 after the old one burnt, on land that had been in our family since the 1790's which if you do the math means that my family has called the same plot of earth home for more than two hundred years. Back in 1991, about 2 years shy of that bicentennial, my mother sold the property to strangers, in pursuit of a promotion in Northern Ontario. As a lonely 15 year old, at the time, I was nothing short of traumatized and it took me a long time to forgive her---along with our home she sold our hope, our place in world, my grandchildren were someday going to play here, or so I had always thought--- but forgiveness comes with time and it came easiest to me the summer before last when she bought it back.

The old house has seen much better days. Mom's investing every dime she's got into bringing it back to it's former Craftsman inspired charm, however she's got her work cut out for her: the front of the house has been painted while the sides and back are the same old white they've always been (Mom did this before she realized it would be a better idea to reside the whole house). Since it already has what my step father would call a mother-in-law-door all it needs now is a bunch of cars rusting in the back yard to make it a red neck special.

In case you wondered, I'm not sure what possessed her to paint the front door red, but through that front door is a sun porch. My uncle Pat once drove a snow mobile through it. Going forward through another door is the kitchen, where I said my first word, "happy," and in which I stood just yesterday and was less than happy as I gazed about the room which was gutted and full of old building materials. The old floor planks were bare to the elements.

So finding myself in the middle of what can only be described as devastation I was snapping pictures left and right and I could not help but feel as though I were documenting a third world operating room where a dear old friend lay splayed upon a shabby old table with all his precious organs set out upon a tarnished tray, awaiting not just for a good heart but kidneys as well.

The fact is that this whole section of the house needs to be made level before any lasting and worthwhile change can take place, and that is just not something that is in the budget, meanwhile the house is not livable with no kitchen and no bathroom so my mother is renting. Hence the monicker: the Money Pit after the 1980's comedy flic about a couple who purchase a so called fixer upper mansion and it's just one 'hillarious' and expensive catastrophe after another as they attempt to build a life in a building that should have been condemned.

Don't get me wrong the old house is still Home to me, a member of the family, but for the life of me I can't figure out how we'll ever get her ticker going again.

Starting to figure it out

Over the past three years I've spent a lot of time contemplating Life from every angle, because my life like most peoples did not turn out quite the way I thought it would. Everything I've put effort into has taken sort of a left turn off the beaten path and all of a sudden I had to re-figure-out everything I thought I knew. Have you ever reached that point? A rock bottom? A sudden unexpected opportunity? Is that what it takes for everyone to make meaningful change or just meatheads like me?