Maybe I Have Too Much Time To Think (Or Read)

We have patience for everything but what is most important to us.  We look at the life of our own most central imaginings and see it beckon.  For the most part, we have not the courage to follow it, but we do not have the courage to leave it.  We turn our face for a moment and tell ourselves we will be sure to get back to it.  When we look again, ten years have passed and we wonder what in God's name happened to us.

We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by the imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years.  Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment, and quickly busy ourselves.  But then we must live with the consequences of turning away.

               --David Whyte

At least I'll be on vacation in a few days.

File under Stuff That Don't Fit Anywhere Else.

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Ain't It The Truth

The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

--John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

File under Stuff That Don't Fit Anywhere Else.

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