Library

The Library

My general philosophy of life:
Hope for the best, Prepare for the worst, And take what comes.

Daisy's general philosophy of life:
Cats Rule, Dogs Drool

"If you only had one phone call to make before you die, who would you call? What would you say? And why are you waiting?".................Unknown

"I've learned that people will forget what you said; people will forget what you did; but people will never forget how you made them feel" (Maya Angelou)

The Ship

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of strength and beauty,
and I stand and watch her until she is only a ribbon of white cloud
where the sea and the sky seem to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says "There, she is gone!"
Gone? Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all.
She is just as complete in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side,
and just as able to bear her precious freight to the place of destination.
Her diminished appearance is in me - not in her.
And at the very moment when someone at my side says, "There she is gone!,"
Other voices shout with gladness "Here she comes!"
And that is death.
Death is only a horizon, and a horizon is the limit of our sight. Luther Beecher

"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous.
If a man really wants to make a million dollars,
the best way would be to start his own religion." (Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, 1949, then just a science fiction writer.)

Meaning by Sheldon Kopp
This is it - there are no hidden meanings. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things. The world is not necessarily just. Nevertheless, you have a responsibility to do your best You are free to do whatever you like - You need only face the consequences. Yet it is necessary to keep on struggling. There is no way to get all you want. Often things ARE as bad as they seem. Even so, some of the time, it is possible to enjoy life as it is. But the better anything gets, the more we miss it when it is gone What's a person to do about feeling helpless? For a while there's just no way to see what's funny about being stuck. At last you cry out in anguish: "Why me?" And God answers: "Why not?" You wait for everything to be all right. Knowing all the while that the next problem is already in the mail. Life just keeps coming at you. There's nothing to figure out. Life is not "about" anything. The answers keep changing. The questions remain the same. It helps to know that everyone is in the same situation It helps, but not enough. Remember, we are all in this alone. We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, partial knowledge. All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. We must learn the power of living with our helplessness. And loving with our helplessness. And beginning again and again and again.

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah! What then?

Marilyn French is a favorite author of mine. Three of her books, The Women's Room, The Bleeding Heart,and Her Mother's Daughter, explore, respectively, a woman's relationship with other women, with men, and with daughters. I found all three to be very insightful and thought-provoking. A Season in Hell is her true account of her own battle with esophageal cancer. It notes some very interesting examples of how cancer patients (and others) are sometimes treated in even world-famous hospitals. I recently finished reading Our Father, which she completed during her fight with cancer.

A few years ago, I subscribed to a local newspaper that ran a weekly column called "The Driver's Seat", written by Bob Driver. I always enjoyed his comments on subjects both silly and profound and saved many of the columns. I would like to repost a few of those columns in hopes that you will enjoy them as much as I did. One of these is called

Life's Large Dreams Buried in a Mound of Nits
The philosophers and self-help writers encourage us to have the heart of a lion and to soar with the eagles. But how do you do that when you are being nibbled to death by ducks?
The ducks I refer to are the little, niggling, worrisome details of life that most of us must put up with. I guess that no matter what one's station in life, petty chores must be taken care of.
Even if I am a multi-millionaire or the head of an international corporation, I must spend part of my day attending to nits. (Technically, nits are called lice. Call them the lice of life.) I may have hired six aides and servants to take care of some of the nits, but there will always remain two or a dozen that nobody can dispose of except me.
And if I am just an average Joe, the nits are all the more numerous, because I do not have servants or aides or a secretary to help me out. If I want something done, I do it myself.
Which is OK, most days. At least when I do something on my own, I either get it done to my satisfaction or, if I make a mistake, I have no one else to blame. That is good training. It makes you self-reliant.
It also can drive you mad, because, while you are doing the clipping, filing, sorting, longhand writing, telephoning, mail-opening and checking of details, no one is getting the rest of your work done.
At the end of your day, when your boss says, "Why didn't you do thus and so, as I asked you?" it does no good to tell him that you spent six hours digging your way out of a pile of nits that had accumulated.
The struggle with nits can be eased by one or two techniques.
One of them is daily nit-coping. If every day you faithfully devote at least part of your energy and time to nits, you can sometimes stay ahead of them. But if you slack off and let the nits mount, they will overwhelm you.
If this happens, you may want to resort to a second tool for nit-coping. This consists of taking all the nits and throwing them into a trash can. You gather up all your clippings, un-answered letters, phone memos, self-memos and to-do lists and consign them to the nearest dumpster.
This gives you a momentary feeling of relief. It's wonderful.
It may also put you into small claims court, or bankruptcy. That's because some of the nits you tossed out were bills you should have paid or notes from the company president saying, "Could you give me 10 minutes one day soon, so that we can decide whether you want to go on working here?"
Someone has defined genius as the infinite capacity for detail. If that is true, then I have spent a few days as a genius. As such a day began, I resolved to give close attention to every nit and nibble that tugged at my cuff or landed on my desk. It became a kind of therapy. When the day ended, I was proud of my discipline, restraint and maturity.
Unfortunately, the last time I had a day like that was in 1987.
Ever since then, I have not been a genius. Like most of my fellow laborers in the vineyard, I have been a mere functionary, masquerading (in my case) as a columnist, editorial writer, public relations executive, husband, father, home-owner or whatever.
The typical man or woman wears many hats, but underneath all of them there stands bewildered clerks.
We may dream of high achievement, but in our hearts we know that around the next bend there will not be a new horizon or peak to be explored and conquered. Instead, what awaits is another mound of nits.

Who you spend time with is who you become.
(or, to put it another way)
Our friends define us.

Here is a little mystery for you. Do you know where the characters go when you use the backspace or delete them on your PC? Do you give up? Well, here is the answer.

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