It Could Happen

If you want to kill imagination, it is an easy process of reduction. Simply hunker down, grab on to what you know, and make more rules. Then convince yourself that your dreams aren’t safe and that change will be deadly. Finally, press your imagination into the service of your fear. That always does the trick.

via http://37days.typepad.com/thecircleproject/2005/10/sisyphus_rocks_.html

I find man's religions absurdly inadequate to the emerging knowledge of the physical universe we inhabit. Nearly all the matter and energy in that vastness exists in conditions inimical to life. It would seem quite wasteful for God to create all that merely as a substrate for one little planet. Yet I find the materialist view sterile and incomplete. I do not agree that humans are meaningless chance excrescences. What is the truth? We cannot know. But I find faith and unfaith equally unsustainable, which puts me in a most awkward position.

-- Alan Sullivan, "Faith and Unfaith" (Fresh Bilge).

via http://www.outerlife.com/2005/10/nb_3.html

"When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur.

When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made.

Don't look for the big, quick improvement.

See the small improvements one day at a time.

That's the only way it happens--and when it happens, it lasts."

(John Wooden, award-winning UCLA basketball coach)

via http://sixdisciplines.blogspot.com/2005/10/excellence-quote-of-day-102105.html

The secret of life is to have a task, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is: It must be something you cannot possibly do.

~ Henry Moore

via http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/occupationaladventure/2005/10/set_sail_for_th.html

“This is the true joy in life … being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one … being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy … I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing on to future generations.”

George Bernard Shaw

via http://www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/talkingstory/2005/10/i_want_to_be_th.html

"Jobs doesn't care just about winning. He's willing to lose... He's just not willing to be lame, and that may, increasingly, be the winning approach."

via http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/10/the_concept_car.html

You Can't Have It All 

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

you can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

Of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it be August and abundantly so. You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,

so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who will tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,

but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in hot sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's.

It will always whisper, you can't have it all,

but there is this.

                -- Barbara Ras

via pomegranatesandpaper

"Don't ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -Howard Thurman

via http://www.superherodesigns.com/journal/

The secret of life is to have a task, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is: It must be something you cannot possibly do.

~ Henry Moore

via http://www.worthwhilemag.com/entry/2005/10/13/set_sail_for_the_impossible.php

It has come to this,—that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. It is monstrous when one cares but little about trees but much about Corinthian columns, and yet this is exceedingly common. Thoreau

via http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/2005/10/thoreaus-journal-09-oct-1857.html

Keep alive within you and bring under wise control that courage which makes you long to undertake great works, which others might consider it folly to attempt.

--St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Embrace the World

via http://www.kathrynpetro.com/mindfullife/archives/001152.html

“We have magnificent brains, but we use a great deal of our brilliance to keep ourselves stuck and ignorant, to keep ourselves from not shining. We are so afraid of our beauty and radiance and brilliance because it scared the adults around us when we were children.” — Patricia Sun

“People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.” — Meister Eckhart

via http://www.woodka.com/2005/10/12/radiance/

"A man's life is full of all sorts of voices calling him in all sorts of directions. Some of them are voices from inside and some of them are voices from outside. The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives are. Which do we listen to? What kind of voice do we listen for?"

Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations by Frederick Buechner

via http://acircleofquiet.blogspot.com/2005/10/listening-to-your-life.html

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

--Charles Mingus

via http://www.kathrynpetro.com/mindfullife/archives/001148.html

The Wind is whispering in my ear, nothing is forever, not even you. stop. walk slow. breathe it in. take this time to think. read. wonder.

http://storms.typepad.com/booklust/2005/10/the_autumn_of_m.html

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” – Alfred Souza

via http://37days.typepad.com/37days/2005/10/own_your_typhoo.html

Do not stand by my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am a diamond glint on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awake to the morning hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starshine at night
Do not stand by my grave and cry
I am not there, I did not die.

- Mary Frye, 1932

via http://blog.thirdage.com/?p=228

The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it's really a different kind of life. Buckminster Fuller

via http://aliedwards.typepad.com/_a_/2005/09/a_different_kin.html

Quietness by Rumi
Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky,
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

via http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/crossroads_dispatches/2005/10/on_the_same_hap.html

Eight Ways to Self-Actualize

By George Ambler

1. Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you.


2. Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.


3. Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.


4. When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.


5. Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.


6. Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.


7. Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not.


8. Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don't like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses--and then finding the courage to give them up.

via http://leading-forward.blogspot.com/2005/10/eight-ways-to-self-actualize.html

The secret of life is to have a task, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is: It must be something you cannot possibly do.

~ Henry Moore

via http://www.jenniferinc.com/blog/?p=120

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know. I do not get nearer by a hair’s breadth to any natural object so long as I presume that I have an introduction to it from some learned man. To conceive of it with a total apprehension I must for the thousandth time approach it as something totally strange. If you would make acquaintance with the ferns you must forget your botany.

Henry David Thoreau

via http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/2005/10/thoreaus-journal-04-oct-1859.html

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. —John Quincy Adams

"I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying." —The Shawshank Redemption (Tim Robbins)

"Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself. Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe." —Winston Churchill

"[Heroine Margaret Schlegel was] not beautiful, nor supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities—something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life." —E.M. Forster, Howard's End (Three cheers for the "intangibles"—how about this for a hiring criterion?)

"The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B." —James Yorke, mathematician, on chaos theory in The New Scientist (I love this! Improv rules!)

"Tom, what have you done this year?" —Jessica Sutherland, IIR ME (Try answering that succinctly and persuasively—one of the best questions I've ever been asked.)

via http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?rss=1&note=http://www.tompeters.com/blogs/main/008164.php

Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
Talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.
Make all your friends feel there is something special about them.
Be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others.
Be too big for worry and too noble for anger.

From Christian D. Larsen, author of the Optimist Creed

via http://windsormedia.blogs.com/lipsticking/2005/09/jane_shares_ins.html

"Every act of creativity is an act of faith. The essence of faith is to proceed without any real evidence that our effort will be rewarded. The act of faith in choosing to live out a way of operating that we alone believe in gives real meaning to our work and our lives" - Peter Block in The Empowered Manager

Via http://leading-forward.blogspot.com/2005/09/creativity-requires-courage.html

"If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair, we'd never have a friendship, we'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well that's just nonsense! You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build wings on the way down." ~Ray Bradbury

via http://www.kerismith.com/blog/archives/000283.html