Don’t worry about tomorrow; who knows what will befall you today?
–Yiddish folk saying
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.
–Isaac Asimov
You’re at that age when everything Mother Nature gave you, Father Time is taking away.
–Milton Berle
THAT for six thousand years
—and no one knows how many millions of ages before
—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings
—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour
—this is surely a noteworthy thing.
–Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Chap. 85: The Fountain) by Herman Melville
Although this road winds tortuously at times, and even appears to turn back upon itself so that we seem to return again and again to the same place, patient plodding does result in progress.
OUR REBEL EMOTIONS by Bernard Mobbs (1970)
There is an art, or rather a knack, to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it’s the second point, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t.
You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING, Chpt 9, by Douglas Adams
“Leaden paralysis” is a psychiatric term.
If your thought patterns & attitudes, your very sense of self, could be altered by medication, there seems little room in the equation for the soul.
The Christian existentialist conclusion is that the soul is that which chooses.
Malfunctioning receptors may sap or boost your energy. Chemical fluctuations may create a racket in your head. But you can choose your words & actions.
Choose to reject the Voice of Doom.
MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT MY THOUGHTS ~Kathleen Founds, The Sun Magazine, February 2022
Conscience is a spiritual agent enforcing the essence of Logos-Soul.
The Thinker presides over affairs in the home of consciousness.
The Word – A Philosophy (1958) by Edna Sarah Beardsley
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo.
She succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing.
And when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away.
Besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to.
Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (1865)
for a clever animation -> Alice and the Flamingo