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

 

....................with a friend called Fish.

 I know intelligence when I see it. I’d recognize a Bigfoot, too, on sight, because it’s about as rare.

artificial demands....................

 

     The artificial demands of outlines, graphic organizers, and panning often subvert the creative process and force would-be writers to think about what they are writing before a word even hits the page rather than allowing them to spill their guts and evaluate the material later.

-Matthew Dicks, Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling

meaning.......................

 We don't need to measure our notions of happiness or progress against imagined universal constants for those concepts.  They don't exist.  Even the typical notions of success change with time, context, and fashion.  We do not need to prove that our ideas of identity or purpose are watertight in some objective, evidence-based sense.  That isn't how meaning works.  Meaning is a story, and act of creation and interpretations, and for human beings meaning is at least as important as fact.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

This could explain a lot...........

 George Marshall, then Army chief of staff, said after the war: “The leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.”

Most decisions aren’t made on a spreadsheet, where you just add up the numbers and a rational answer pops out. There’s a human element that’s hard to quantify, hard to explain, and can seem totally detached from the original goal, yet carries more influence than anything else.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Extremely short stories.........................

 The night before the D-Day Invasion, Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next.

“To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said.

-Morgan Housel, this being one of the 18 vignettes in this post

A dirty little secret......................................

     "I try to learn from the past without being inspired by it.  My big question is always, 'What did they try, and why did it work?'  When I hear stories of success and failure, I look for the little things that made a big difference.  What conventional wisdom was shunned? . . . I avoid using a past success as a proxy for the future.  After all, the dirty little secret is that every success was almost a failure.  Timing and uncontrollable circumstances play more of a role than any of us care to admit.

-Scott Belsky, as culled from here

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

We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one.  To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

-Frederick Forsyth,  The Outsider:  My Life in Intrigue

When he is right...........................

........................................................he is right.

"What happens to us matters a great deal, but even more powerful are the stories we repeat about what happened."

via

True this...............................

Those who can tell their story in an engaging way will have a leg up on the competition. Everyone is in sales.

-Ben Carlson, from this post on Selling Intangibles

Healing................................

.............................is available via simple acts of humanity.

Stories.........................

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

-Max Ehrmann,  Desiderata

Hey old woman, have you ever danced.......?

.....................................story here.  Moral here:

1 – Never be arrogant.
2 – Don’t waste ammunition.
3 – Whiskey makes you think you’re smarter than 
       you are.
4 – Always make sure you know who has the 
       power.
5 – Don’t mess with old people; they didn’t get old 
       by being stupid.

Nope.........................................

   
    My wife and I were buying groceries one day, and I was on one side of the store and she was on the other, and over a shelf of breakfast cereal and cake mix I said, "Don't forget the cream," and she said, "All right, but don't forget you're trying to lose weight," and I said, "Oh well, you only live once."  and then it happened, this thing that broke for a moment through my deafness.  The store was nearly empty so that the woman at the checkout counter had no trouble hearing us.  It was a hot, muggy afternoon, and she had been working hard all day and looked flushed and hectic there behind her cash register and the racks of Life Savers and chewing gum and TV guides, and when I said, "Oh well, you only life once," she broke into the conversation , and what she said was, "Don't you think once is enough?"

-Frederick Buechner,  The Hungering Dark

I'm not sure............................................

.............................................but, I think this means war.

A Bulgarian prince gave the following answer to the Greek Emperor who good-naturedly suggested that they settle their difference by a duel:  "A smith who has tongs won't pluck the glowing iron from the fire with his hands."

-The Immanuel Kant Collection


What an amazing world we live in.  For a mere ninety-nine cents, you can have more Kant delivered, flawlessly and wirelessly to your Kindle (sorry Jeff), than you will ever want to read.  Wonderful!

A sad tale..........................................

via

Although, it might take some time..........

Whatever initial misconceptions spin doctors may promote, reality will out.
-John Kay

Bookmarks.................................

..........................Guilty as charged.  Back story here.

Ambrose Bierce and his Fantastic Fables....

  The Moral Principle and the Material Interest

  A MORAL Principle met a Material Interest on a bridge wide enough 
for but one.

  "Down, you base thing!" thundered the Moral Principle, "and let me 
pass over you!"

  The Material Interest merely looked in the other's eyes without 
saying anything.

  "Ah," said the Moral Principle, hesitatingly, "let us draw lots to 
see which shall retire till the other has crossed."

  The Material Interest maintained an unbroken silence and an 
unwavering stare.

  "In order to avoid a conflict," the Moral Principle resumed, 
somewhat uneasily, "I shall myself lie down and let you walk over 
me."

  Then the Material Interest found a tongue, and by a strange 
coincidence it was its own tongue.  "I don't think you are very 
good walking," it said.  "I am a little particular about what I 
have underfoot.  Suppose you get off into the water."

  It occurred that way.

via

We didn’t have the “green thing” back then......

Ray, with a bit of attitude, takes us back to those  pre-green days.  You know, that  time in our history when stuff got repaired, retro-fitted, re-used, and handed-down.  That time when blue jeans got holes in the knees from hard use, instead of trendy design.  That time when those holey jeans were first patched, and then, with a pair of scissors in hand,  turned  into shorts for summer time wearing.  That time when the clothes line in the back yard was in active use eight months out of the year.  That time that the only power to the mower came from legs and arms.  That time when, if we wanted to get somewhere, we walked or rode our bikes.  You know, the good old days.  Anyway, Ray takes us back there.  Enjoy the trip - and the attitude:

"We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to piss us off…especially from a tattooed, multiple pierced smartass who can’t make change without the cash register telling them how much."

Re-visiting Hume, causation, history, and the future..........and all before breakfast

From The Walrus comes an interesting essay on us humans and
our seemingly never-ending need for an apocalyptic vision of our
future - here.  So far we've dodged the bullets.  Excerpt here:

Human beings are remarkably bad at predicting even relatively short-term, simple occurrences, such as the weather on Monday or the price of gold on Friday, much less something as vast and complex as the future of humanity. Many important events of the recent past came as a surprise to most people: World War I, the stock market crash of 1929, the Cold War, the computer age, the economic meltdown of 2008, the Arab Awakening, even the Occupy Wall Street movement. Part of the problem, as Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out in the eighteenth century, is that we are equipped with a concept of “cause” that constitutes little more than an association of things or events in the past — and projecting the patterns of the past onto the future is perilous. We read books of narrative history and biography and get the impression that what made things happen, what shaped the story, was always sharply defined and clear, when in fact it wasn’t and more likely still isn’t. The real problem with the future is that it doesn’t yet exist, and the forces that bring it into existence are too complicated, too subtle and volatile and fractal, for us to know in advance — or ever.

Thanks A & L