Over the Green Fence - the Pasture is Greener

Fences in the neighborhood can be quite pathetic, but the alternative is... they could be quite darling and daring if all the neighbors decided to live a little on the other side of the green fence.

For instance, take this rickety old picket fence.

Please!

If you took it, the neighbors could contact the victim's fund and they'd have money to replace the picket fence with a few good fencing ideas, like the one I'm going to show you right below this paragraph. Consider for a moment if this neighbor, painted their rickety old fence and tacked it to a support post that kept it from being rickety. Cleaned up the weeds in front of the fence, and planted green grass on the other side of the newly painted picket fence. (Tom Sawyer - eat your heart out!)

The problem is, the white picket fence would not be as appropriate for this property as the fence it has already on the property. A white picket fence would be a larger ecological footprint for the owner to leave in the sands of time. And the home owner probably would feel very out of place behind a white picket fence with greener pastures.

Sometimes people choose to be who they are because it's comfortable and they don't know anything else, but sometimes they choose to be who they are simply because that's who they are.

Many years ago a woman in my parent's business organization showed up to a meeting and asked for a brighter red lipstick. She was wearing a mixture of orange and red clothing and claimed her lipstick (an unheavenly shade of red) wasn't as bright as she'd like it to be. My parents offered her a different shade of lipstick (they sold it as one of many products at that time), and explained that they could order any shade she liked. Before the woman left our home that evening, she had applied the new "gaudier" shade of lipstick.

Another woman of a more graceful appearance had explained to me a few days before that you have to be the kind of person you want to attract. You can't change those who surround you, but you can change yourself, and whatever you change yourself into, that's what you'll attract to you. I listened and when I saw the woman in red lipstick I considered her words.

We can't all be the high class social elite that attract only high class social elite to ourselves. What we can do, is be the best "US" we can be and attempt to attract those whom we desire to spend our time with. If we're failing, we need to change.

In short, if the pasture on the other side of the fence is always greener, perhaps you should change your fence. White picket fences - what a generational topic!