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NFL Tragedy

Kansas City Chiefs’ linebacker Jovan Belcher committed suicide this weekend by shooting himself in the head outside the team’s practice facility just minutes after he shot and killed his girlfriend, the mother of the couple’s 3-month-old daughter. The unfolding of events sounded horrific to the degree that the newspaper article coverage this morning provided few details.

Chiefs’ starting quarterback Brady Quinn spoke of the tragedy, saying he plans to be more cognizant of the personal situations of those to whom he is most close. “The one thing people can hopefully try to take away is the relationships they have with people”, he said. “When it happened… I was thinking what I could have done differently/When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth? Hopefully people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing.”

I like this aforementioned thought. Personally, I think everyone is battling something deeper on the inside then what they are revealing. Some people are living lives of immense, secret anguish, something you’d never decipher from their upbeat Facebook page. Others are just unhappy to a lesser degree and don’t want to lead with their personal pain, which is understandable. The quote that comes to mind here, often attributed to Plato, is: “Be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”  It’s important to remember that there’s a reason we’re all on earth, that this place provides a lot of lessons and ways to grow your soul. But running away from problems through destructive habits and refusing to work through illusion will eventually extract things from us, sometimes our very lives.