On time and majorities..........

 

Everyone hopes for an immediate solution, but the only solution to social problems comes through time.  We in America always believe we have only to pass a law and everything will be changed. . . . People only obey a law the majority have already decided to obey, and it must be a very large majority.

-Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

Wisdom......................

 

.........................from our friend at Sippican Cottage:

Time marches on. You can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The past is another county. Whatever. But I’m sure glad I didn’t forget to have kids in the first place.

Patience Grasshopper........................

 A good summary of investing history is that stocks [and real estate] pay a fortune in the long run but seek punitive damages when you demand to be paid sooner. . . . there's a "most convenient" investing time horizon—probably somewhere around ten years or more.  That's the period in which markets nearly always reward your patience.  The more your time horizon compresses, the more you rely on luck and tempt ruin.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

time passage.....................

      General Dreedle had thrown open Colonel Cathcart's private skeet-shooting range to every officer and enlisted man in the group on combat duty.  General Dreedle wanted his men to spend as much time out on the skeet-shooting range as the facilities and their flight schedules would allow.  Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them.  It trained them to shoot skeet.

     Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly.  He figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.

-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

waiting....................

I have used up more than

20,000 days waiting to see

what the next would bring.

-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

Years......................

 All those years

I had in my pocket.

I spent them

nickel-and-dime.

-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

Actually seems fairly long................

        The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.  Here's one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death.  But you?  Assuming you live to be eighty, you'll have had about four thousand weeks.

-Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

On Time...................................

 Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage.  It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of what controlling power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it.  Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2:4

we make it so.......................

"It's not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it.  Life is long enough, and it's given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well.  But when it's poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it's employed to no good end, we're finally driven to see that it has passed by before we recognized it passing.  And so it is—we don't receive a short life, we make it so."

-Seneca,  De Brevitate Vitae, from the 12/26 entry in The Daily Stoic

By blogging........................................?

Time......................................

“As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”


-Haruki Murakami

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Time Travel..............................

.......................................Enjoy a preserved cinematic view of New York City (population about 4.7 million) in 1911. A different time:

 

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In praise of butterflies...................

.............................and short attention spans.   Kurt shares a truth.

No, in the end, as in the beginning, there was nothing for it for me but to become a writer, for one of the surest routes to becoming a writer, or so after some consideration I have discovered, is to be fit to do nothing else. In my case, a writer meant, specifically, an essayist, that butterfly among literary workers, flying from subject to subject, as butterflies do from flower to flower. Montaigne, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Max Beerbohm, H.L. Mencken, the great essayists, were, I do believe, short-attention-span men, butterflies all.

Hey Sweetie..........................

Oh, it's a long, long while 
From May to December 
But the days grow short, 
When you reach September. 
When the autumn weather 
Turn leaves to flame 
One hasn't got time 
For the waiting game. 

Oh the days dwindle down 
To a precious few . . . 
September, November . . . 
And these few precious days 
I'll spend with you. 
These precious days 
I'll spend with you.

Oh the days dwindle down 
To a precious few . . . 
September, November . . . 
And these few precious days 
I'll spend with you. 
These precious days 
I'll spend with you.
These precious days 
I'll spend with you.

30 observations after 30 years..........

Today marks 30 years since a confident young man walked into the back office of Schroder Investment Management in London, to start his first day on the job, the first in his career. Ask me a question back then and I would have answered assuredly and quickly. Today I’d be more likely to say ‘I don’t know’ with just as much confidence.

-so commences this Broadsword Capital post.   Read the whole thing.  Here are a few wee passages:

The lessons stand the test of time. The stocks, companies, and players change, but human nature never changes. We’re all human, even millennials.

Everything is a risk. Getting up, going out, crossing the road, but ultimately I am responsible for everything that happens to me.

Social media is a tough arena. ... Be nice. We all have off days. You never know what’s going on in people’s lives. Everyone’s going through something.

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Within..............................

All forms of loss are a confrontation to the ego, and its survival mechanisms.  All aspects of human life are transient, so to cling to any aspect eventually brings grief and loss.  Each incident, however, is an opportunity to search within for the source of life, which is ever present, unchanging, and not subject to loss or the ravages of time.

-David Hawkins

Wisdom.......................

"... do two things:  1) Improve everything touched by the problem; turn bad fortune around.  It tells the unforeseen not to mess with you;  and 2) Push your way back in.  Cajole progress.  Make things move along without making everyone miserable.  If you wait on progress you will only frustrate yourself. "

-Kurt Harden, from here

Be careful of genuflection...........

     In other words, the numerical, chronological age has no power within itself.  It is our beliefs about it, how we hold it in mind, and how we genuflect to all the belief systems that go with it and that we have bought into throughout the years that have power.  How is it that some people are dancing and performing at age eighty, and other people at age fifty-nine are ready for the grave?

-David R. Hawkins, Healing And Recovery

The death of conversation................?

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Play ball.....................................!

"The genius of every nation expresses itself in the people's manner of passing their time, and in their pleasures."

-Charles Rollin,  The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and ...