Friendship

There are two categories of friendship:
those in which people are enlivened by each other
and those in which people must be enlivened to be with each other.
In the first category one clears the decks to be together.
In the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

                 Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level

 

 

 

Ready to get it

You can be standing right in front of the truth
and not necessarily see it,
and people only get it when they’re ready to get it.

                George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology  

 

 

 

 

Change

Not everything that is faced can be changed.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced. …
Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born,
and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

       James Baldwin, As Much Truth As One Can Bear

 

 

 

Where to look

And always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the right side of life...
(Come on guys, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the bright side of life...
(Worse things happen at sea, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of life...
(I mean - what have you got to lose?)
(You know, you come from nothing –
you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!)
Always look on the right side of life...”

                     Eric Idle 

 

 

 

 

Knowing

I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing. 

                     Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

 

 

 

 

Do not disturb

If you’ve been through the big wave of the ocean,
The quiet water of the river cannot disturb you anymore.

                                Chinese poem

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them any more.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

                      Naomi Shihab Nye

 

 

 

 

Resolved

I may live for thirty years, or perhaps forty,
or maybe just one day:
therefore I have resolved to use this day,
or whatever I have to say in these thirty years
or whatever I have to say this one day I may have to live —
I have resolved to use it in such a way
that if not one day in my whole past life has been used well,
this one by the help of God will be.
                   Soren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers 

 

 

 

 

Hope for the best

Hope for the best. Expect the worst.
The world's a stage. We're unrehearsed.

                               Mel Brooks, The Twelve Chairs

 

 

 

 
 

A simple thing

Praise the world to the Angel, not the unsayable: you
can’t impress him with glories of feeling: in the universe,
where he feels more deeply, you are a novice. So show
him a simple thing, fashioned in age after age,
that lives close to hand and in sight.
Tell him things. He’ll be more amazed: as you were,
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter beside the Nile.
Show him how happy things can be, how guiltless and ours,
how even the cry of grief decides on pure form,
serves as a thing, or dies into a thing: transient,
they look to us for deliverance, we, the most transient of all.
Will us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,
into – oh, endlessly, into us! Whoever, in the end, we are.

                   Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Ninth Duino Elegy 

Poem: Final Curve

When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left.

                 Langston Hughes 

Amen, Sister

Fight for the things that you care about,
but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

                       Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 1933-2020 

The big ones

Most people who deal in words 

don't have much faith in them 

and I am no exception — 

especially the big ones 

like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. 

They are too elusive and far too relative 

when you compare them to sharp, mean little words 

like Punk and Cheap and Phony. 

I feel at home with these, 

because they are scrawny and easy to pin, 

but the big ones are tough 

and it takes either a priest or a fool 

to use them with any confidence.
            Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

 

 

 

 

Worries

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about. . .

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

     F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a letter to his 11-year-old daughter away at camp

What to do

The Things to do are: the things that need doing, 

that you see need to be done, 

and that no one else seems to see need to be done. 

Then you will conceive
your own way of doing that which needs to be done — 

that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. 

This will bring out the real you 

that often gets buried inside a character 

that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors 

induced or imposed by others on the individual.

          Buckminster Fuller, letter to a 10-year-old boy 

Patience

Know your own happiness. 

Want for nothing but patience – 

or give it a more fascinating name: 

Call it hope. 

            Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility