Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
Imagine first that the present is past, and second, that the past may yet be changed & amended.
Logotherapy by Victor Frankl
A man can’t cross a hundred thousand light years, mostly in other people’s baggage compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.
Hitchhiker’s Guide by Douglas Adams
Then, in the decades of the Twenty First Century, one after another ten-years burning down the road.
Would you like to buy one of these?
Me too!
They might be found on the discounted thrift shelf by now.
No matter how far we have veered from reverence for the miraculous fact that we exist in a universe that we don’t understand, until we stop getting to dawn, we get a chance to start over.
David Milch
Focus on situations with change potential:
This approach requires serious commitment. Development requires time. The secret is to invest a few moments every day to maximize learning.
Development First by David Peterson & Mary Dee Hicks
Not only a matter of having time to get things done, it’s also a matter of having the energy.
More closely your schedule of rest & activity corresponds to your natural peaks & valleys throughout the day, the more productive your many efforts will be.
Karl Benjamin (1957)
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
Today we are blessed with, and can appreciate, millions of colors. Before the cones of our retina could distinguish between #EFFing blue and pink #FEE, who could say those colors existed at all?
We are organs of a larger organism. It knows us, although we do not know it. I’m a vessel of whatever that larger organism is, its instrument, rather than the source of the scenes. So a lot of what I do is try to get out of the way. That’s the way I work on my writing.
Life’s Work by David Milch (2022)