It has been said that at the core we are all energy. I have no reason to dispute this; however, I have observed that some are able to put their energy together in a much more attractive package. I heard a fella once say that the same God that made Idaho made Indiana – he was just in a better mood when he made Idaho.

    Back when I was trucking across this great land, people would often make the remark about how boring it was crossing the salt flats. This always amazed me. On Highway 80 the salt flats start at the Nevada-Utah state line and it's only approximately 120 miles from there to Salt Lake City. So if you're going coast to coast (about 3,000 miles) it's only a small part of the trip. But the real thing to me was how some people saw things differently.

    I was always amazed at the different formations of the salt, the sayings that people spelled out with rocks along the side of the road. Well, I'm assuming that they were done by people; however, I never really saw anyone doing it so maybe it was by some of those ones we are told don't exist. But that's a whole different subject.

    What I'm referring to is the beauty that's all around us that we tend to ignore. There's a beauty to the desert, to the mountains and everything in between. I think that was one of the things I enjoyed the most about my time spent trucking, and that is looking at the diverse regions of this country.

    Wouldn't it be great if we could just see the beauty in our fellow man? I don't mean the outward beauty; I'm talking about the beauty within. I realize that it's difficult to see the beauty in that fellow that thinks cracking his knuckles in time with the William Tell Overture is a special talent, but I'm sure we all have little quirks that some would find strange.

    In the past, when I was talking to others that have a different view of life and events than I do, I would try to convince them they were wrong and I had a better view of it. I think this is just part of human nature, but now I struggle to see their side of it. I say struggle because in reality we endeavor to avoid becoming aware that we might have been wrong. That said I really don't think it's about right or wrong – it goes back to the Idaho Indiana thing, or was it the salt flats? Some people see beauty differently than others. Then there are those that just look for the ugly in everything – how sad that must be.

    It is my belief that if we would look for the beauty in others, we could begin to change the way things in this world are going. To find the beauty in others we need to look beyond the physical – we have to become aware of their inner beauty. That inner beauty is the energy or the core of a person; some would say their soul or spirit. I think it's all one and the same.

    Energy is, at its core, a vibration; if two people are vibrating at the same rate they will form a kinship for one another without realizing the underlying cause. If we could control our own vibrations then we could synchronize with others. We often do that when we discover that someone whose actions had bothered us were because of some trauma they had just suffered. Suddenly we empathize with them, or maybe we just start vibrating on the same frequency.

    Whether you want to call it energy, spirit, your soul or just personality, deep within you know we have to change our outlook if this species called Homo sapiens is going to survive. We can't continue to fight amongst ourselves. Everybody and every religion has a different name for it, but it boils down, I believe, to one thing and that is we have to love ourselves and improve ourselves first. As the old saying goes: take the log out of your own eye before trying to take the sliver out of someone else's. Another way to say it would be, get your own energy vibration on the right frequency. Tuning and fine-tuning that frequency is a lifetime process and anyone who thinks they have theirs perfectly tuned, just went out of tune.