Stories and Wisdom from a Life Fully Lived

Category: Food for Thought

  • Work/Life Balance?

    Life is Work—Work is Life—What’s the difference?

    There’s no difference. It’s all the same. Some parts of life are natural, spontaneous, fun, enjoyable, and other parts of life require some discipline—like hunting for food, sex, paying the bills, having/raising children, and preparing for a time when you can’t do that anymore.

    Until JOB (corporate and/or government slavery) we relied on family to care for us when we became unable to provide for/support ourselves, and we often provided family support by caring for grandchildren and household functions.

    Of course, that’s all changed in 2022, and actually decades past, when government took over welfare for seniors, freeing children/grandchildren from the “burden” of eldercare.

    I’m very fortunate among the inhabitants of the world. My parents—poor though they were in U.S. standards, scrimped and saved to provide for their four children, me, the oldest. They both supported me and my siblings until the day they died.

    So; what am I saying? Life is!–No balance!–It Just Is! Take it as it comes!

  • Faster

    The Universe is expanding faster.

    Moore’s Law says computer chip speeds and capabilities are getting faster—doubling every two years.

    I can vouch for that and more. In my experience, as the years go by, time is definitely going by faster.

    “Change is the essence and cadence of the universe,” as I remarked in a talk many years ago, way back in the 1960s. And Seth Godin presented some cogent thoughts about this in his newsletter today as he spoke about the speed of change.

    It turns out that the biggest shift to our culture isn’t the changing speed of a computer chip. It’s what happens when we network humans together.

    Adding more people to the internet has sped up science, politics and every element of culture and everything in our life. The echos happen faster; the learning is exponential, and connected communities heat and morph ever faster. I wonder what the internet 3.0 will bring.

    Science used to be a solo endeavor. A monk with some pea plants could figure out genetics. Today, there are millions of people advancing the work of millions of people, with new updates coming all day long. The problems are dramatically more difficult, but the solutions are possible because we’ve multiplied the speed of change.

    That’s why so many people are interested in writing and actually writing today. We live in electric and exciting times. One writer inspires and triggers thoughts, feelings, emotions, and motivations in another writer/reader and more and more energy is pouring into the universe of thought and ideas. This explosion of thought energy is thrusting humankind into a literally unimaginable future—at least unimaginable for me. It is endorphin overload to think about it. It’s going in all directions at once! Which lightning bolt do I hitch a ride on?

    Ok, my wife, Lilyane, says slooow down… We must exercise some common sense. There needs to be some control. We can’t have all these crazy’s controlling the world. Responsible Citizens MUST THINK about what’s best and most responsible for the whole of humanity—the country—the planet, the world, the universe. So please…Think!

    • big
    • national, what’s best for America
    • global, best for America AND the world
    • personal, your heart, what you FEEL
    • what you can do to make a life for all mankind better

  • Do You Need Experience to Write?

    How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

    Henry David Thoreau

    No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience.

    John Locke

  • Important Life Skills

    /https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC5nhc_eEH8

    /linkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH94x03Wl-M

  • Learning

    Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

    Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

    “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

    Steve Jobs

    There’s a lot of truth in the old saying, “hindsight is 20/20”. Yes. That’s the way we learn. By making mistakes, looking back, seeing, understanding, and correcting going forward.

    But hindsight is not perfect. It’s not completely reliable either. Why is that?

    We literally experience every event in our life as colored, possibly contaminated—heavily influenced, seasoned, flavored, by our culture, friends, family beliefs, circumstances into which we’re born, and all of those were influenced by those who preceded them. There’s no such thing as perfect insight. And no such thing as a perfect person.

    What to do? Learn to pivot and keep doing the best you can with what you’ve got, right where you are in this moment. That’s what!

  • To Arrive at Who, What, Where You Want to Be

    there’s no substitute for being at the heart of the action. And to get there, you have to leave here. There’s no substitute for your physical presence at ground zero of your dream.

    Charles Tutt

  • Why a Republic?

  • Dream Live

    Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.

    James Dean

  • Give Sorrow Words

    Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break

    William Shakespeare, Macbeth

    We can hardly bear to look. The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived. Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of yourself.

    Marion Woodman (as quoted by Stephen Cope in The Great Work of Your Life)

    Our joys and our sorrows are reflected in our bodies—our physical health.

    Journaling has been the most satisfying and effective therapy I’ve ever experienced. Keep on reading, though.

  • Dream

    Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.

    James Dean