When I was a little kid and went to Cubs games, I was always impressed by the fact that the only difference between the star baseball players and me was that they were on the field and I was in the stands.  It’s hard to comprehend a greater chasm between the talent of two people than a ten-year old and a future Hall of Fame second baseman (Ryne Sandberg), but I was convinced that if I could just get on the field, I could do what he was doing.  It wasn’t the years of training and ingrained ability that was preventing me from being Sandberg, it’s the fact he was on the field and I wasn’t.

I happened to think of this while looking at this photo of a house in the Cayman Islands because, for a brief second, I thought, “Maybe I could do something like this in Chicago!  I mean, the house is just painted a certain set of colors and I could get greenery like that…”  But, much like being Sandberg by simply getting on the field, the joys of living in this house are in recreating its color scheme or installing a gazebo in suburban Chicago, but rather the fact that it’s located in the Cayman Islands, ten yards from the Caribbean Sea.

Sigh.