Optimism

Optimism is normal,
but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us.
If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias,
you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person --
you already feel fortunate.
Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives.
Their decisions make a difference;
they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders --
not average people.
They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.
They are talented and they have been lucky,
almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. 

            Daniel Kahneman, Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think 

 

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Hang around

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Unexpected wonders happen,
not on schedule,
or when you expect or want them to happen,
but if you keep hanging around,
they do happen.

               Wendell Berry

 

 

 

 

 

Legalities

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And I quote Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk --
I still make retreat with the Trappist monks at Gethsemane --
who said, When the world ends, it will be legal.

                Sister Helen Prejean, Fresh Air interview, April 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Speech to the Young

Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III)

Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
"Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night."
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.

           Gwendolyn Brooks 

Fundamental Principles

Socrates: Well how would you gentlemen compose your fundamental principles, if a majority, exercising its fundamental right to rule, ordained that only Buddhism should be taught in the public schools.

William Jennings Bryan: I’d move to a Christian country.

Thomas Jefferson: I’d exercise the sacred right of revolution. What would you do, Socrates?

Socrates: I’d re-examine my fundamental principles.

                           Walter Lippmann, American Inquisitors 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Failure to Notice

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
there is little we can do to change
until we notice how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.

           R.D. Laing in Educating Christians

 

 

 

 

Free from Hope

I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy.
And I think I'm probably the most cheerful man around.
I don't consider myself a pessimist at all.
I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain.
And I feel completely soaked to the skin. … 

I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate
to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all.
I've always been free from hope.
It's never been one of my great solaces.
I feel that more and more we're invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful. ....
I think that it was Ben Jonson who said,
   I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies,
   but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

                              Leonard Cohen, The Joking Troubadour of Gloom
                              interview in The Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1993 

An important question

The important question to ask is not, 'What do you believe?'
but 'What difference does it make that you believe?'

                         Verna Dozier, The Dream of God

 

 

 

 

 

Looking for a cure

The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.

               Attributed to Dorothy Parker 

 

 

 

 

 

Policy

Love can't be pinned down by a definition,
and it certainly can't be proved,
any more than anything else important in life can be proved.
Love is people, is a person.
A friend of ours, Hugh Bishop of Mirfield, says in one of his books:
"Love is not an emotion. It is a policy."
Those words have often helped me when all my feelings were unlovely.
 
                     Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Sun Rising

        Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
        Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
        Late school-boys and sour prentices,
    Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

        Thy beams so reverend, and strong
        Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
        If her eyes have not blinded thine,
        Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
    Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
    Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

        She's all states, and all princes I;
        Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
        Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
        In that the world's contracted thus;
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

                                    John Donne 

Juneteenth

 
It is a day for poetry and song,
a new song.
These cloudless skies,
this balmy air,
this brilliant sunshine . . .
are in harmony with
the glorious morning of liberty
about to dawn up on us.

               Frederick Douglass

 

 

 

 

 

Productive mistakes

A productive mistake is:
    (1) made in the service of mission and vision;     
    (2) acknowledged as a mistake;
    (3) learned from;
    (4) considered valuable;
    (5) shared for the benefit of all.

           Pete Seeger, How Can I Keep from Singing