When you oughta be truthin'...........................

Nancy Sinatra.........................These Boots Are Made For Walkin'

The core.................................................

"The more radical possibility - the one that takes us to the core of the 'negative' approach to happiness - is that there might be something more fundamentally problematic about the goal of security;  and that real happiness might be dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and vulnerability."
-Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Rightly and wrongly...................................

"Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it, so it is considered normal.  This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being.  It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering."

"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly.  Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.  To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you really don't use it at all.  It uses you.  This is the disease.  You believe that you are your mind.  This is the delusion.  The instrument has taken you over."

-Eckhart Tolle, as excerpted from The Power of Now

Fifty years ago................................

Jewel Akens...........................................The Birds And The Bees

Wait................................................!

"Wait!  Are You Saying That I Have to Stop Following Instructions and Start Being an Artist?  Someone Who Dreams Up New Ideas and Makes Them Real?  Someone Who Finds New Ways to Interact, New Pathways to Deliver Emotion, New Ways to Connect?  Someone Who Acts Like a Human, Not a Cog?  Me?"

Yes.

-Seth Godin, as excerpted from Linchpin:  Are You Indispensable?

Opening paragraphs................................

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.  And that was all his patrimony.  His very paternity was obscure, although the village of Gavrillac had long since dispelled the cloud of mystery that hung about it.  Those simple Brittany folk were not so simple as to be deceived by the pretended relationship which did not even possess the virtue of originality.  When a nobleman, for no apparent reason, announces himself the godfather of an infant fetched no man knew whence, and thereafter cares for the lad's rearing and education, the most unsophisticated of country folk perfectly understand the situation.  And so the good people of Gavrillac permitted themselves no illusions on the relationship between Andre-Louis Moreau -as the lad had been named - and Quintin de Kercadiou, Lord of Gavrillac, who dwelt in the big gray house that dominated from its eminence the village clustering below.
-Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

Rejection....................................

"The foolish reject what they see, not what they think;  the wise reject what they think, not what they see."
-Huang Po

Trying to unsee.....................................

via

when the sunset is set free.........................

The Outlaws......................................................Girl From Ohio

Out of proportion...................................

"...a staggering proportion of human activity - in politics, business, and international relations, as much as in our personal lives - is motivated by the desire to feel safe and secure.  And yet this quest to feel secure doesn't always lead to security, still less to happiness.  It turns out to be an awkward truth about psychology that people who find themselves in what the rest of us might consider conditions of extreme insecurity - such as severe poverty - discover insights into happiness from which the rest of us could stand to learn.  And if the most radical proponents of the 'negative path' are to be believed, in turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion - and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for."
-Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Whew..................................................

.....................................................sure glad I didn't buy one.

"Fifty-inch plasma screen TVs cannot cure spiritual emptiness."

As excerpted from here

No escape.........................................

"Things are not permanent, they don't last, there is no final security.  What makes us miserable is not this truth, but our efforts to escape it.
-Pema Chodron

Fifty years ago...........................................

At the movies................................................A Thousand Clowns

It happens every Spring..............................

Unfortunately.............................................

......................................................I've mastered a few of these.

........with a side of trumpet.....................

The Rippingtons............................................................Angelfire

OK.........................................................

Oh, what can it mean..............................

The Monkees.................................................Daydream Believer

Reverie..............................................

“A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie it's pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.” 
-Victor Hugo

cartoon via

Skipped class the day they taught this......

423. - Few know how to be old.

-Francois de la Rochefoucauld, Reflections; Or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Fifty years ago....................................

Beach Boys.............................................Then I Kissed Her

Realization...............................

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
-Marcus Aurelius

Opportunity........................................

"Never since the world began were there such good opportunities to be lazy with distinction."
-Dorothea Brande,  Wake Up And Live!

cartoon via

Newton got beaned.........................................

R.E.M...........................................................Man On The Moon

Incalculable, thank God...........................

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” 
-Isaac Newton

Uh-oh..............................................

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” 
-Albert Ellis

via

Gone but not forgotten.......................

“The only thing greater than the power of the mind is the courage of the heart” 
-John Nash

Fifty years ago........................................

Little Anthony & The Imperials........................Take Me Back

Unattached...........................................

"To live non-attachedly is to feel impulses, think thoughts, and experience life without becoming hooked by mental narratives about how things 'should' be, or should never be, or should remain forever.  The perfectly non-attached Buddhist would be simply, calmly present, and non-judgmentally aware.
      "Which, let's be frank, isn't going to happen for most of us any time soon."
-Oliver Burkeman,  The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Uncertain.......................................

“The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed—such a probabilistic, uncertain world.” 
-Albert Ellis

cartoon via

Passing time...................................

"Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company."
-Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

A Fillmore East jam.......................

The Byrds........................................................Eight Miles High

Happy Memorial Day...............................

via

Beauty............................................

Happy Birthday Kate..................................

Survival of the most adaptable....................

via

Fifty years ago.....................................

The (lip-synching) Byrds........................All I Really Want To Do

A reason to tune out the media................

via

Frankly, my dear................................

.......................................................I don't give a damn.

"My journey started with a realization that the more media investors paid attention to, the worse they did. The more they analyzed, the more decisions they had to make. The more decisions they made, the more chances they had at being wrong, letting their emotions take over, and doing something regrettable. Find someone who has mastered personal finance, and you'll find someone with a pathological ability to not give a damn."

-Morgan Housel, as excerpted from here

And now a few words..............................

..........................................................from Warren Buffett:

"The American Dream promises that a combination of education, hard work and good behavior can move any citizen from humble beginnings to at least reasonable success."

"No conspiracy lies behind this depressing fact: The poor are most definitely not poor because the rich are rich. Nor are the rich undeserving. Most of them have contributed brilliant innovations or managerial expertise to America’s well-being. We all live far better because of Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Sam Walton and the like."

-as excerpted from here

A little organ music for a Sunday morning.......

Booker T. &  The MG's.......................................Hang 'em High

Too good not to copy.................................

thanks

Musturbation........................

"We elevate those things we want, those things we would prefer to have, into things we believe we must have;  we feel we must perform well in certain circumstances or that other people must treat us well.  Because we thing these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not.  No wonder we get so anxious:  we've decided that if we failed to meet our goal it wouldn't merely be bad, but completely bad - absolutely terrible."
-Oliver Burkeman,  The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Fifty years ago......................................

At the movies..................................................Doctor Zhivago

The way we are......................................

"'As the Buddha said two and a half thousand years ago,' he said, soon after we'd started talking, and jabbing a finger in my direction, 'we're all out of our fucking minds!  That's just the way we are.'"
-Oliver Burkeman, talking about Albert Ellis in The Antidote:  Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

On work.............................................

"In a sign of a stronger economy, more young adults are skipping college and heading back to work."
-as excerpted from here

Forty years ago I remember my father  lamenting that so much emphasis was being put on getting high school seniors into college.  He felt a good bit that emphasis included the disparagement of labor.  A fully functioning society needs tradesmen. Without plumbers, carpenters, electricians, drywallers, excavators, and the like, it is difficult to get things built - or fixed.  In our part of the world we are now experiencing a shortage of tradesmen.   A young person today can learn a trade in a year or so and become a productive worker, earning a good living (to say nothing of avoiding a mountain of debt).  There is dignity in the mastery of a trade. We should honor and encourage that as much as we honor a college degree.

thanks glenn

OK......................................................