Well, I already did it. Twice. I had intended to do a posting twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I still intend to do it, but I didn’t do it last Friday. Neither did I put in the abstruse ‘fact for musing’ last Monday.
Somebody apparently said, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ I don’t know that I’d go that far (either to say that or to travel that road to its destination), but I do know that many people get into their biggest trouble by breaking commitments or promises they made and that others’ counted on—in marriage, diet, financial obligations, work commitments, etc. I doubt if anybody lost any sleep by finding they could not read a new posting from me last Friday, but I do know that my credibility took a hit—if not from a reader, at least from me, the non-poster. So what does one do? He tries again.
Here is my combined last-Friday and today, Monday posting: It is taken from some provocative thoughts by Robert Fulghum,. All I Really Need to Know I learned In Kindergarten. Ivy Books, New York, 1988.
-"Place your bet somewhere between haste-makes-waste and he-who-hesitates-is-lost." (75)
-[re. liberated women or people] "Liberation, I guess, is everybody getting what they think they want, without knowing the whole truth. Or in other words, liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of." (104)
-[His cure for depression: put on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.] "The music comes on like the first day of Creation." "I find an irresistible affirmation. In deep spiritual winter, I find inside myself the sun of summer. . . " (110)
-Fulghum's Exchange Principle: "Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away." (117)
-"Imagination is more important than information." (Einstein)
-"All things live only if something else is cleared out of the path to make way. No death; no life. No exceptions. Things must come and go. People. Years. Ideas. Everything. The wheel turns, and the old is cleared away as fodder for the new." (146)
-"In a sense we make up all our relatives. . . fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and the rest. Especially if they are dead or distant. We take what we know, which isn't ever the whole story, and we add it to what we wish and need, and stitch it together into some kind of family quilt to wrap up in on our mental couch. We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. Thinking about the grandfather I wish I had prepares me for the grandfather I wish to be, a way of using what I am to shape the best that is to come. It is a preparation."
Fact for musing: In 1903, Flyer 1, the Wright brothers’ biplane, traveled for 120’ through the air. If it had taken off inside a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet at the tail end, it would have touched down 111 feet from the nose—still inside the plane.
2 comments:
I committed, only to myself, that I would "try" to post twice a week on my blog and did very well for over a year. This year has been harder. But I know of lots of blogs that get started and go months between posts. You mostly give up on reading those. I very much liked your last idea about how we are a compilation of our relatives. I will borrow that one.
Excellent thoughts Ron. The 'Liberation' definition sounds a lot like the definition of status, "buying things you don't want with money you don't have in order to impress people you don't even like".
I thought of the scripture in Eccl 3:1-8, 'To everything there is a season..." after reading his thoughts on death and the clearing away of things. I too have peered down that road 'paved with good intentions' regarding journal writing and posting blogs. So I too just try to hang in there and keep doing it. I rather thought you would have mentioned something about our wonderful time at Cypress a week ago today with our visiting General Authorities. I am still reflecting upon the warmth I felt from these two good brethren. Anyway, take care.
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