A real friend

I learned something about true friendship tonight that I would like to share with you in the form of a quick story...
There are extensive renovations taking place where I work right now. We're talking about MAJOR construction, with entire portions of the building being completely torn down and re-built. To chronicle this, they've placed a time-lapse camera to capture the process and it runs around the clock. When it's all over they'll have a pretty cool sped-up video documenting how it all went from old to new.
It's startling how so many of my best ideas really aren't even good ones. I have ideas all the time, none of which address the various forms of suffering going on in the world at a given moment. Nope, these are ideas on a much, much smaller scale: things that amuse me. One of my latest has to do with the fact that I know where the time-lapse camera at work is. And my idea is to stand in front of it, as motionless as possible for about 20 minutes or so, so that when the renovation is complete and people watch the video, I pop up just long enough for people to say, "what...did I just see?". And the answer would be me, with a stupid smile on my face, saying "hello!". All I really need to pull it off would be a ladder and somebody keeping lookout. I brought this idea up to my friend and asked what she thought and her reply was, "I really think there is great potential for growth opportunities for you there in the future and I would like to see you in position to take advantage of them."

The moral of the story is, sometimes in life, you will have dreams and aspirations that need to be crushed and snuffed out before somebody...probably you...gets hurt. Not every balloon you blow up deserves to soar off into the wild blue yonder. Some balloons need to be punctured before they can get loose, spread out and breed. If you're fortunate, you have at least one friend who can deflate your bad balloons. If you're really fortunate, they'll do it by gently squeezing all the air out of it instead of just jamming a pin into it.