Soon we will have completed our annual list of good intentions. Across the country there are millions of cigarettes waiting to be stomped out, tons of fat waiting to be lost, miles to be run, lives to be organized, selves to be improved.
Once again, we will pass resolutions as if we were our own Congress, legislating changes in our lives. On a million scraps of paper, we will publish an updated catalog of promises to be filed on the shelf of the self….
But I have a feeling that our resolutions have more to do with controlling our lives than enriching them….
We spend Jan. 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a punch list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. We decide that it’s time to get a painful grip on ourselves….
But life improvement is not just a matter of discipline, self-control. It’s a matter of expansion, the deliberate pursuit of happiness….
We ought to walk through the rooms of our lives a second time, not looking for the flaws, but for potential.
~Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe, December 1982
Monthly Archives: December 2017
It Happens To Everyone
Agatha Christie Quote
Happy The Heart
Happy the heart that keeps its twilight hour,
And, in the depths of heavenly peace reclined,
Loves to commune with thoughts of tender power,–
Thoughts that ascend, like angels beautiful,
A shining Jacob’s-ladder of the mind!
-Paul H. Hayne, Sonnet IX
Breathing
Reality
The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is above all else a variable. With a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
-Margaret Halsey, No Laughing Matter
Dreams
Dreaming permits each and everyone of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of the week. -William Dement, Newsweek, November 30, 1959