Taking Kurt's.........................

.........................................................................advice:

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

-Henry Louis Mencken

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

On the second floor of a characterless hotel in the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar, a lithe, agile man in his late fifties restlessly paced his bedroom.  His very British features, though pleasant and plainly honourable, indicated a choleric nature brought to the limit of its endurance.  A distraught lecturer, you might have thought, observing the bookish forward lean and loping stride and the errant forelock of salt-and-pepper hair that repeatedly had to be disciplined with a jerky back-handed shoves of the bony wrist.  Certainly it would not have occurred to many people, even in their most fanciful dreams,t hat he was a middle-ranking British civil servant, hauled from his desk in one of the more prosaic departments of Her Majesty's Foreign and Commonwealth Office to be dispatched on a top-secret mission of acute sensitivity.

-John Le Carré,  A Delicate Truth

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

Gary Puckett & The Union Gap................Don't Give In To Him

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

The Neon Philharmonic.......................................Morning Girl

Friday the 13th......................

Parenting 101..........................

I had a mother who told me I could do anything, and a father who said, ‘Prove it.’  That’s the best school there was.

-Austin Kleon, as lifted from here

Progress both ways.......................

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

-John F. Kennedy, as extracted from this speech

thanks Chris

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

The Beatles.......................................................................Because

Thinking this is now more true than ever............

Life its ownself.........................

“Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.”

-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Work..................................

“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.” 

-Ram Dass

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

The Beatles............She Came In Through The Bathroom Window

Questions and answers.......................

The quality of the answers we get are directly correlated with the quality of the questions we ask.

We can learn a lot, often more, from the work involved in answering a question than from the answer itself.

There are no dumb questions. Don’t be afraid to ask them. They are the most straight forward path to learning.

-All from this Farnam Street post

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

The Beatles....................................................Here Comes The Sun

All we need is love.......................

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

-attributed to John Lennon

but not too much.....................

Always the last to know...............

“I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know.” 

-Paul McCartney

On saying "Yes"....................

“I’ve never really done anything to create what has happened. It creates itself. I’m here because it happened. But I didn’t do anything to make it happen apart from saying ‘Yes’” 

-Ringo Starr

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

The Beatles.................................................Octopus's Garden

The tension is baked into it..............

..............................................................Life its ownself.

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

Plastic Ono Band.........................................Give Peace A Chance