A lifelong refusal to live

What if the world was filled with brilliant color and light?  What if God gave us bodies to explore and map an entire world which started in mystery?

True holiness is found in humility.  Some agents of good have never been seen nor praised.

You are the person who knows all your thoughts, but there are people who have not heard of you or your thoughts at all. 

And would it be good if they did?  Billions of agents carry on about their lives, totally ignorant that you exist; but perhaps today one of them will meet you.  Will it be a good day for that person?

Our imaginations are what make us morally culpable.  We are all able to imagine acts of kindness, of service, of grace, which we then fail to perform. 

Can we imagine holy lives? 

But our wills are frail and weak, and so holy we do not become. 

What if you were placed in a world of eternally important creatures, and were supposed to love any and all of them that you could?  What if you were allowed into a place where you could decide how to talk and act; what would you do?

Humility is not assuming you are unimportant; quite the opposite.  A creature of no importance would not be called to be humble.  It would not matter what a creature of no importance did. 

We wake up morning by morning, but our will to love stays asleep.  We must stay away from people until we can wake it up.

Do we plan our lives so that we will be most able to love other people?

What if your body wasn't yours, but was just a loan to let you be in reality for a short time?  What if it was an amazing thing to be alive?

All colliding at this moment

A person may seem amazing, because they are an artist or a speaker, and we know them from reading about them.  But they are just a normal person, who wakes up and lives their day, just like everyone else.  They might even like playing cards.

I like art.  Art is anything that contributes to the idea of you as a person.  What people think of when they think of you is the total effect of your art.  Thus every word you say is art.  Every face you make is art.  Your whole life is one grand artistic performance. 

There is a difference between following someone's reasoning and a bit of reasoning occurring to you.  If you follow it, you are reading the way they thought, but if it occurs to you, you are in the situation in which that conclusion made sense.  It usually turns out that we believe what occurs to us, not what we follow.

It's good when someone acts the same way in public all the time, because then you can tell when they say something to you which is really honest, because it will be breaking this persona.

If you never reveal your intentions, people will never know when you fail. 

Your need to seem smart is not as important as my need to understand your argument.  Just say what you mean.

It is hard to tell whether what someone is saying is everything they are thinking.

If people don't like it when their friends talk bad about them behind their back, just think how upset people would be if we had access to each others' thoughts!

And that is all this moment has in store for us.  Ciao out.

All the world's a stage

Acting is a good deal of fun, and if I ever have children I plan to homeschool them.  It seems fitting, then, that every year of school they should have a new teacher. 

For fourth grade I will be Mr. Fred, a very serious man with spectacles and a long face.  He speaks very slowly, and is sometimes hard to understand because of his long sentences, but he is always very patient and very kind.  Mr. Fred is getting a bit old and because of that is a little hard of hearing, so the students may to shout a bit during this year.

Then in fifth grade the children will meet Mr. Sludgworth, a mean and snarly man, who is very stout and pudgy around the cheeks.  He has a higher voice than Mr. Fred and is much more abrupt in his manner of dealing with students.  Probably bitter about something in his past.

Sixth grade will be a real treat: Mr. Delaney.  On the first day of class Mr. Delaney, bubbling and smiling with all the effulgence of the sun, will march into class and announce, "Students: today begins your grand adventure of learning.  As we meet together, you will see ideas float in the air right through this very class, and sometimes we will climb aboard and see where they take us: to foreign and strange lands, to meet new people; or maybe to the land of the very tiny, the cell, inside our very selves! Or maybe into history to see the daring adventures and mysteries which have already come to pass; or maybe—just maybe, if we're lucky—we'll get to launch into outer space and visit the stars and see if there are any aliens around!  Yes, students, it is a very exciting thing to learn!"

Mr. Delaney will be excited each and every day, and the students and he will grow quite dear to one another.  How sad that he will have to go at the end of the year.

And so on and so forth, until the children will have had quite an array of teachers throughout their education.  

If they ever have a problem they will probably need a parent, in which case hopefully the makeup and costume comes off easily. 

It might be a bit of a problem if I have to compete with Mr. Delaney for my children's affection.  He's going to be a very lovable guy; I might just have to get a sub for the second half of the year because Mr. Delaney had a little drug problem.  But after the boring Mr. Fred and grouchy Mr. Sludgworth, my children will love me so much that hopefully that won't be a problem.

Gentle into that Good Night

"And so eventually it wound up all of the people playing croquet had no idea what the rules were!"
Both men bursted out laughing.
"You should have seen them, going every which way—not a clue!"
"A wonderful story, thank you for that," the larger man said, still chuckling.
"Yeah," the smaller man said, looking around at the other people at the party.  "So what about basketball?"
"What about basketball?" the larger man replied, frowning.
"I asked you first," the smaller man said, a wide grin across his face.
The larger man snapped into action, shoving the smaller man against the wall, looking around to make sure no one was looking.
"YOU LISTEN TO ME," he said intensely, his face very close to the smaller man, "I will not have this witless small talk be a part of my life, you hear me?"
"Uh . . ." the smaller man said, his eyes wide and glancing around.
"I said you hear me??"
"I'm sorry?"
"YOU'D BETTER BE!" the larger man snarled, spit flying out of his mouth, "I have plans, you know!  Plans to live an amazing life, one filled with incredible people, people who seem too incredible to even exist.  My life is going to be one of the most thrilling lives ever, one filled with stories other people could only dream of happening!  You got that??"
The larger man's eyes glowed with a rageful intensity. 
"I SAID YOU GOT THAT??"
"Ye-ye, uh, yeah . . . w-why exactly?"
"Because, you fool," the larger man began slowly, "how ELSE will I make it into history?!? How ESLE will people remember me?!"
"Umm . . . there is no other way?" the smaller man guessed.
"Assassinate someone, that's how," the larger man responded condescendingly, "But guess what?  I don't have the have the hand-eye coordination for that!"
"Oh," the smaller man said stupidly.
"Yeah, Oh!" mocked the larger man, "So now we're going to return to our conversation, and you had better have something more intelligent and memorable to say than some vague, open-ended comment about basketball . . . okay?"
"Ye-yeah," the smaller man stuttered, sliding down back onto the floor.   
"So then," the larger man began, brushing himself off, "where were we?"
The smaller man then gulped noticeably, hoping his brain would take this as a signal to think of something good. 

An impatient hourglass

There is only one person who knows what it is like to have wound up being you in the story of the universe. 

It is possible for a thought to be a recurring motif in a person's life for many many years, and then one day they write one sentence about it in a journal, and that is all anyone would ever know of it.

We must strive at all costs to make sure that the titles of our biographies do not read: "A Life Somewhat Lived."

Say strange things to see how people would react if that thing were said by you in that moment.  For if you always say things much in line with how things normally go, you will never experience the thrill of an improbable conversation.

Understanding is what happens when you answer a question through a combination of experiences.  The problem is that we often want direct answers to our questions, because we are impatient.

The most devastating comment that can be made about a view—even if it is the correct one—is that people 'don't take it seriously.'

I am having trouble sleeping, friends.  My body feels about ready to go on an African safarii.  *sigh*  Perhaps I'll go look for something boring to read . . .