Carpe Diem

 

(clicking imbiggens)

I have a brittle, fading, yellowed copy of this hanging on my wall that I clipped out of the newspaper many, many years ago.

It's probably my favorite comic strip of all time.

Pickles by Brian Crane can be found on the web HERE.

Daily Rituals

"Here’s the true secret of life: We mostly do everything over and over. In the morning, we let the dogs out, make coffee, read the paper, and help whoever is around get ready for the day. We do our work. In the afternoon, if we have any time left, we come home, put down our keys and satchels, let the dogs out, take off constrictive clothing, make a drink or put water on for tea, toast the leftover bit of scone. I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.… Daily rituals, especially walks, even forced marches around the neighborhood, and schedules, whether work or meals with non-awful people, can be the knots you hold on to when you’ve run out of rope."  ~Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair ©2013

Active/Passive

 "Take for instance a man driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for money. In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion, and his activity is in reality a “passivity” because he is driven; he is the sufferer, not the “actor.” On the other hand a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his oneness with the world, is considered to be “passive”, because he is not “doing” anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition of inner freedom and independence."  ~Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving ©1956

Self Care

"Take care of yourself, drink a lot of water, and focus on your work.  And don't be afraid to feel joy.  It's OK-- no, it's essential to be happy in this troubled world."  ~Patti Smith

Happy?

Like fireworks we will ignite…

 

It's not hard to make people angry or sad, but if you can lift someone up when they're feeling down, that's something special.  That's a gift.

Full lyrics HERE.

They Kept Going

 

 

(Click to Imbiggen)

Aspirations

 

Enthusiasm

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about."  ~Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley's works are in the public domain and may be read online or downloaded freely from Project Gutenberg, HERE. 

The Secret to Happiness

 According to researchers, 

The data-driven answer to life is as follows:  Be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex.

(source)

Never Not

"Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now."  ~Eckhart Tolle

But Because

“A maior parte do tempo que você se sente cansado não é porque você fez muito, mas porque você fez pouco daquilo que te faz sentir vivo.”  ~Caio Costa

―•―

“Most of the time you feel tired is not because you did too much, but because you did little of what makes you feel alive."  ~Caio Costa

Live a Little

 

Every Single Thing

 

I wished I lived someplace where people wrote things like this then hung it on a wall for everybody to see.

In East Texas all we get is profanity and crude drawings of genitalia.

Happy?

 Nuha Kahn writes of "toxic positivity" for The Walrus:

It’s an experience most people can relate to: forcing a smile, holding back tears, saying “I’m fine” when you’re far from it. In a survey by Science of People, over 75 percent of respondents said they had rejected or ignored their emotions in an attempt to be happy.

Trying to live through a glossy Instagram filter can shame us away from experiencing real emotions.

You can read the whole article HERE.

We've been taught to separate our emotions by category; happiness is "good," and almost every other emotion is "bad."  And that's a mistake.

I'd much rather be happy than sad, but there are times when sadness is the appropriate way to feel.  That's when you lean on your friends.

There's a line in the Bob Dylan song "Forever Young" that I keep coming back to:  "May you always do for others, and let others do for you."  Everybody wants to be in the first category, not the second; but paradoxically, sometimes letting others help you helps them.

(Pete Seeger did an amazing cover of that song, which you can listen to HERE.)

Purpose

 I like the idea that our purpose in life might not be Grand and Exulted, it might be something quite simple.

Will Rogers (might have) said, "We all can't be heroes, for someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by."  (source)

LunarBaboon, on the web HERE, put it like this:

Right?

 

This excerpt from Answers from the Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh, ©2009, illustrates the fundamental difference between Buddhism and Christianity.  Christianity is all about the destination, heaven or hell, while Buddhism is more concerned with the path: 

"If you don’t feel that you’re on the right path, happiness isn’t possible. This is true for everyone; if you don’t know where you’re going, you suffer. It’s very important to realize your path and see your true way.

"Happiness means feeling you are on the right path every moment. You don’t need to arrive at the end of the path in order to be happy. The right path refers to the very concrete ways you live your life in every moment. In Buddhism, we speak of the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. It’s possible for us to live the Noble Eightfold Path every moment of our daily lives. That not only makes us happy, it makes people around us happy. If you practice the path, you become very pleasant, very fresh, and very compassionate." 

It Just Was

 Excerpted from A Boy and a Bear in a Boat by Dave Shelton, ©2012:

"You should get some sleep," said the bear.  "I'll keep going for a bit.  It's a nice night.  Thought I'd row for a while longer and take a look at the moon."

"Look at the moon?" said the boy.  "Why?  It's not going to do anything, is it?  I mean, the moon is just the moon."  But as he said it he looked up at the moon himself and, as there was nothing better to do, he kept looking at it for quite a while.  He'd been right, it didn't do anything, but it didn't have to, it was just beautiful.  It just was.  The boy gazed at the moon, longer and harder than he ever had before (because who would spend time looking at the moon when there was a telly to watch and video games to play and comics to read?) and felt, for a moment, calm and safe and sure.

"Coo!" he said, but very quietly.  And then the boy looked at the stars.  There were a lot of them, more, he thought, than usual.  He wondered where all the new ones had come from.  Maybe they were just all the usual ones but they'd all bunched together in the same bit of sky.  He twisted his neck looking up at different patches of sky, but they all seemed equally crowded.

"You can see more stars out here," said the bear, as if reading the boy's mind, "because it's properly dark."

The boy lowered his head and looked at the bear.

"It's funny, isn't it?"  the bear went on.  "With everything else you can't see as well in the dark, but with stars you can see them better.  In towns, with streetlights and suchlike, it's not dark enough to see some of them, but out here…"  He looked up and smiled and either forgot to continue or felt no need.  The boy looked up again too.  They sat there for a while, quiet and content, drinking in the beauty of the bejewelled night.

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat is one of my favorite books.  I have posted about it before, and you can read the old posts HERE.

Wonderful

 "Anything looked at closely becomes wonderful." ~A.R. Ammons

Just A Thing

 

Butt Poems by J. Smith is on the web HERE.