Poetry, Prose and Parable.

Draw a Line.

Our local television station runs an advertisement for electricity power line safety. I hope you are able to access it via this link; https://youtu.be/0ZboMHrzioI. Anyway it has got me to thinking about the lines which are drawn in all of our lives because for much of our lives we are either on one side of the line or the other.

Law and decision makers must draw a line somewhere which indicates a cut off point. For example on one side of the line you are driving within the speeding limit but pass that line and you could be in for a speeding fine. Likewise one one side of the line you are driving with in legal alcohol limits and on the other side you run the risk of losing your licence. This line applies to all the big events of life also; events like birth, marriage, death, taxes, education, employment, religion and a myriad of other decisions we make or which are made for us as we transverse our time on the earth.

We all live within boundaries, some are imposed on us but wise and healthy people embrace their own boundary lines which are there to protect themselves and the ones they love from violations. Johnny Cash understood the importance of lines in personal relationships and to keep his, he was prepared to walk the line. https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjRloq8-ZnuAhWt63MBHfXiAnMQwqsBMAN6BAgOEBE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWw0rm7sWRg8&usg=AOvVaw30nf4rdSJ8Xfg4VzMDOTtS

Sometimes we just have to draw a line in the sand. We decide whatever has happened to bring us to this point, we are going to draw a line underneath it. We can forgive and rebuild. In this case we cannot keep going back to the past, grabbing handfuls of sand and hurling them into the present. We look to a brighter and better future.

There is another line which we all have; I call this our bottom line. The funny thing about a person’s bottom line is that we really don’t know where it is until it is crossed. I observe that people can absorb a lot, they can be very forgiving and optimistic with hope that things will improve. But at some point there is that bottom line and once crossed there is no going back. It is serious to violate another person’s bottom line, once done, things can never be the same.