a continual cascading...............

“Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantage point in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.” 


-Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

Hoping to miss out on Step 4..................

      via

It's December. Let the Christmas music begin...

August Burns Red........................................Carol Of The Bells

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

Van Morrison........................................................Sweet Thing

Never is a long time.................

It is miraculous.............

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” 

-Albert Einstein

Failsafe..............................

     via

Worth re-reading from time to time....

On bubbles......................

“If possible, avoid being a bubble; for a bubble, even the gentlest touch is fatal.” 


-Mehmet Murat ildan

This has actually aged pretty well........

    "I don't know why the economy works, but I'm sure it isn't because brilliant people are managing it.  My guess is that if you sum up all the absurd activities of management, the idiocies somehow cancel out, thus producing cool things that you want to buy, such as Nerf balls and Snapple.  Add the law of supply and demand to the mix and you've pretty much described the whole theory of economics."

-Scott Adams, from his 1996 tome, The Dilbert Principle:  A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions

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

The Beatles.................................................................Hey Jude

It's puzzle time...................

What will it take to balance the last pairing?

Faithful readers will likely not need to be provided the answer.  On the off chance they might be interested in more puzzles (and answers), such will be found here.

Thanks Doug

Responsibility.................

“We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.” 

-Camille Paglia

Gratitude.............................

“Thank God for the things that I do not own.”

-St. Teresa of Avila

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

At the cinema.....Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

A recipe................................

If you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you…People dedicated to something other than themselves—helping family and friends, or a political cause, or others less fortunate than they—are the happiest people in the world.

-Michael Crichton, as taken from here

With apologies to Queen.......

...........................................................Opinion Rhapsody

Good luck with this...................

" . . . advance the goals of “deliberative democracy” by incentivizing people to be flexible belief updaters whose views converge in response to facts, thus depolarizing unnecessarily polarized debates."

-as culled from here

A pretty exhaustive list.............

...............................................of things within my control:

via

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

The Beatles..................................................................Blackbird