[ WP ] You have been able to read minds your entire life . One day , in a fast food restaurant , and you 're casually reading someone 's mind . However , to your surprise , they furrow their brow , look at you angrily , and say , `` Stop that ! ''

Wisdom. Wisdom is coveted. It's treasured by all walks of life in all corners of the earth. It's the final stepping stone of humanity. We all strive to be wise, to look up at everything and just know what's going on and be happy about it. We all want that. Everyone wants that. 
 
 To be wise is to be content. To be content is to be accepting. To be accepting is to be open. That is wisdom. Openness is wisdom. So when a person so open to life, so accepting of people, so content of circumstance becomes wise, they become the pinnacle of human achievement. They become happy. 
 
 Usually, and this is my uninformed definition based on years of inexperience, wisdom comes with age. It comes with intense mistakes and valuable lessons. It comes with years of regret and decades of forgiveness. Wise people are old. 
 
 Think Uncle Iroh¹. Think Buddah, or Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Helen Keller, and Benjamin Franklin. Think Josiah Bartlet². Those old people were/are wise. Those people became wise after years of hardships and living. They became wise the hard way. 
 
 Then there's me. I'm not calling myself wise. Far from it, I'm calling myself storied. I'm calling myself traveled, which I am. I've been a lot of wheres and done a lot of things. I've learned a great many lessons and met a great many people. I'm not wise, but I'm close. And I'm young. 
 
 31 years old, to be exact. I'm not *young* young, I know that. I'm not patronizing myself. I'm older than a lot of very smart people who've accomplished many things of which I ca n't nearly comprehend. I'm older than a lot of smart people, yes, but younger than a lot more wise people. To be a 23 year old genius is one thing. To possess absolute wisdom at 23 years old is another. I may be pushing it, but I've got good years ahead of me. 
 
 Here's the first thing to know about me: I'm good. I'm a good guy. I live by a moral code not unlike those wise people above. I do no ill will nor stand for ill will done to others. My empathy scale is off the charts. I'm super duper nice and love living life, which I've done, extensively. 
 
 Here's the second thing to know about me: I'm straight telepathic. I hear people's thoughts, I hear them clearly, and I hear them whenever I want. That's crazy. Yeah, that's really crazy and I know it and I do n't know why I have this gift. And I said gift. That's important. This is n't any sort of Sookie Stackhouse³ deal. I'm not overwhelmed with judgmental thoughts from mean strangers. I can turn it on and off whenever I want, just like that. It has n't always been this way, high school being a completely different story, but right now, as I am, I would n't give it up for anything. 
 
 Thing three: I'm a wanderer. That's less important. But straight out of Dion's mouth⁴, I roam around, around, around. So it should come as no surprise that I'm wandering groggily into some Canadian diner at nine in the morning with no thoughts on anything and no idea where I am. I'm smart, I'm almost wise, I'm telepathic, and I'm a wanderer. That's me. That's all there is to know. So without further ado, this is an experience I had not too long ago. 
 
 The wind howled softly on a stale mid-January morning. My dull gray boots rightfully squished under the pressure of each footstep, each trudge that pulled me closer and closer to nothing really important at all. I was cold, tired, or weary. Yeah, weary's more like it. I was a pitiful weary traveler that had a bright idea to take a shortcut through a lawn of snow on my way to a slightly hungry breakfast. So my pants were soaked, my feat were soaked, I arrived maybe ten seconds earlier than the sidewalk route would haven taken, and I was grumpy. 
 
 I pulled open the icy glass door without substance, walking across the homely-looking establishment's entrance sub the usual gravitas common to my daily adventures. This diner looked appetizing, seemed popular in this small Canadian town. There were n't too many people seated, of which I really could not care less, my affinity to conversation not then present. I Thoroughly wiped my feet on the sludge crusted feet-wiping mat and teetered to the bar. 
 
 The cook on hand slid a paper menu from two seats down and introduced himself, asking my drink preference before wiping down some mess I could not see on the other side of the counter. 
 
 `` Green tea, please,'' I requested after looking the items over. 
 
 I was n't expecting to see such an un-diner like option, but was pleasantly surprised. I'd been drinking way too much coffee. *Way* too much. I love green tea, but there is n't really a market in small town diners and pubs across rural pre-Rockies Canada. And I do n't much care for the black variety, so coffee it was, with a bunch of sugar and a bit of cream. It'd been maybe three weeks since my last nice hot cup of tea, and I was loving it. That simple drink was the optimistic tipping point for an almost miserable day. 
 
 `` Coming right up,'' the young man said and ventured to the right while I looked over the foodstuff. 
 
 So the fourth thing to know about me, and this is more important than the wanderer one, is that I almost never use my gift. I know, I said I loved it and would n't give it up for anything, but that does n't mean I take it for granted. I respect privacy, a lot, and do my best never to invade it. When I was young and angsty and dumb, so very dumb, I abused my power to a really bad extent. I'm a good guy, I said I was a good guy, but I have skeletons just like anybody else. Although I prefer not to dwell, things got ugly and I walked away set monetarily for life. I re-payed everything re-payable and gave generously to the unfortunate people I affected, but I walked away. I walked away and kept on walking. 
 
 And that's how those four things collided. I'm a good guy who did n't fully understand the gift of telepathy and ended up doing bad things. After those bad things were done, I had to go wander away to atone for stuff. As a result, I value my power to a hazardous degree. I'll still use it to help other people, sure, all the time, but pretty much never for my own personal gain. There's a line somewhere I prefer not to cross. 
 
 So, back to the story, the nice employee had served me some delicious tea and I was still undecided about my breakfast. The sausage and hash browns seemed good, but so did the chocolate chip pancakes. And the steak and eggs. Man, do I dig steak and eggs in the morning. I took another delightful sip of tea and asked for a fruit salad, because, well, I'm thirty one. I'm not wise yet, but I'd like to live long enough to someday get there. 
 
 I twiddled my thumbs while waiting for the guy to do whatever it was he does to make fruit salads. It probably involved chopping or something, or not. I had no idea if it was fresh or frozen, but whatever, I'd already resigned myself to eating a little healthier than usual. The twiddling went on for some two minutes before my food was delivered. I, with varied melancholy, dug in. It was sweet, a little savory, all around not too bad. I still craved steak and eggs, but it was n't too too bad. 
 
 As I took my third or fourth bite, I heard the front door slide open and felt a steady whisper of cold clawing at my then scarf-less neck. With a forkful of pineapple in my mouth, I very nosily turned around to investigate. 
 
 Now, in the Canadian destitution that is winter, one would n't expect to feel warm. One would n't really expect to find anything, but especially not warmth. It's so cold with so few things creating heat, the days short, the nights long, the season unbearable, that true warmth is nearly impossible to imagine. Comfort is one thing. Finding comfort next to a fire at 11 p.m. with its ever-mesmerizing glow plastered across all inches of a nice quaint living room is easy enough. Warmth, no. Warmth is harder to come by. But I felt warmth. At that specific moment and the lengthy moments that followed, I felt the warmth out of warmth. And it was warm. What I'm trying to say is, well, this poorly thought out description of an easily describable feeling, this shamble of a sentence, is my attempt at introducing a beautiful woman. 
 
 The diner's newcomer was a very beautiful woman that made me warm and took my breath away and all that good jazz. She shook the outside's hazards off her person and wiped her feet before walking over to the bar, sitting maybe three seats down from me and my manly disgrace of a breakfast. What was it? A fruit salad and green tea? No, I needed steak and eggs and a piping hot cup of joe, black as black. 
 
 I did n't reorder, however, because as much as I would have liked to somehow impress this swell gal with my unhealthily superior breakfast choices, I was quite enjoying the meal at hand. So I stopped not-so-discretely looking at her and went back to chewing fruit. She promptly ordered a coffee, greeting the cook kindly and making polite conversation as she inspected her paper menu. Eavesdropping as any sane person would do, I overheard a little bit of her story. 
 
 
 *** 
 
 Footnotes 
 
 ¹ [ The dopest firebender ] ( http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar: _The_Last_Airbender ) 
 
 ² [ The dopest president ] ( http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_West_Wing ) 
 
 ³ [ A dope waitress ] ( http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Blood ) 
 
 ⁴ [ The dopest Dion single, not counting Runaroud Sue of course ] ( https: //www.youtube.com/watch? v=hVzU -- Qp5fE ) 
 
 *** 
 
 ~~Almost there. I have to stop for a bit to make dinner~~ My dinner was delicious. Blueberry balsamic coated chicken and mushrooms with rosemary boiled potatoes if anyone's wondering, which I know no one is. 
 
 Now, I'm done with this story ( Part two is down below ). Check out my website, [ casualhuman.com ] ( http: //casualhuman.com ), if you liked it and loved it and got ta have more of it. If not, that's cool too. Just go to Coldstone or something.
