Friends

You can learn a lot from your lovers,
but - for the most part -
you get to keep your friends longer,
and you learn more from them.

        John Irving, In One Person: A Novel

 

 

 

 

Known unknown

Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not.
People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

    Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

 

 

 

Bitter knowledge

Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this:
to know so much and to have control over nothing.

        Herodotus, The Histories

 

 

 

 

Reminder

We cannot all do everything.

        Virgil, Eclogues

Faith

Faith is not a certainty.
Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.

        Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Case for God

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Waiting in Line

When you listen you reach
into dark corners and
pull out your wonders.
When you listen your
ideas come in and out
like they were waiting in line.
Your ears don’t always listen.
It can be your brain, your
fingers, your toes.
You can listen anywhere.
Your mind might not want to go.
If you can listen you can find
answers to questions you didn’t know.
If you have listened, truly
listened, you don’t find your
self alone.
 

    Nick Penna (who wrote this when he was nine years old)

 

 

 

 

The mysterious essence of life

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

    Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time