Wisdom Life

Have an aptitude for hard work and concentration and actually following through on the work that you've got.

Never take yourself or your talent for granted. Believe all the time that you are never quite there, dedicate yourself to the work at hand, don't take it lightly.

Take pride in what you do.

Be dedicated to the craft, to the job you have been gifted.

If you are to continue what it is you are doing, you have to take stock, and say, how might I best manage this?

You've got to get through the third act, you've got to finish as strong as you began. If that's the proposition then get to work.

- Michael Parkinson

If you're standing still, you are decaying.

It's all going to change, and flowing within change keeps us flexible and helps to develop a sense of humour about everything.

You are something other than and maybe more important than, what you do. Don't define yourself by what you do for a living. Your work is an outgrowth of who you are.

- Alan Arkin

Who you are and what you need are things you will have to find out yourself.

If you are grabbed by art, you should do whatever comes best to you. It doesn't matter which form, as long as you are doing something about the situation.

- Chinua Achebe

Aristotle said, "Nothing too much." The best thing is not to search for the best nor for the worst, but the middle.

We should try and be ambitious and try to get the best out of ourselves. If you do that you can achieve a state of being which must be related to something like wisdom.

- Frederik Bolkestein

Wisdom is in the constant questioning of where you are. And when you stop wanting to know, you are dead.

Find what you should be doing and do it.

- Billy Connolly

The most important thing you can do is understand how you are coming across, because once you do you can present ideas. It opens the game very big.

- Frank Gehry

It's about finding who you are. The reality of who you are. And when you reduce it down, it becomes that the miracle is life itself. It's right now. It's immediate and so it's living each moment. With acceptance comes peace.

Consciousness is something you gain by experience and focussing on your own individual being. You know, trying to watch your own self being yourself. Then you are the observer and the observed, then you soon realize, are you the thought or the thinker? You are both.

Compassion is recognizing the peace within yourself and that allows you to see others.

Embracing uncertainty is actually the creative process. That gives you the juice to go.

- Nick Nolte

 A soft answer turns wrath away.

- Desmond Tutu

Ring the bells than still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

Leonard Cohen

Copyright Aneev Rao

...and that's what Hunter said.

'The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid.

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment.To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

We must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.'

H.S.T

Turner-isk

For what the Ship most ardently seeks is the feeling of wholeness and perfection in plying its way under full sail. It is as if I am looking for that special place and time in which everything flows into everything else, everything is linked, and everything is aware, as it were, of everything else. All at once the wind will die down and I will find myself becalmed in a place where nothing moves. Yet I'll sense that there are things in these calm and misty waters that will, if I am patient, move the journey forward.

O.P. (Other Colours)

The Lovers by Rene

 Rene Magritte served in the Belgian Infantry for a short time, and worked at a wallpaper company  before he began to paint. He made his living producing advertising posters in a business he ran with his brother, where he also created forgeries of Picasso, Braque and Chirico. His experience with forgeries also allowed him to create false bank notes during the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, helping him to survive the lean economic times.

Magritte’s mother was a suicidal woman, which led her husband, Magritte’s father, to lock her up in her room. One day, she escaped, and was found down a nearby river dead, having drowned herself. History asserts that 13 year old Magritte was there when they retrieved the body from the river. As she was pulled from the water, her dress covered her face. This became a theme for Magritte’s paintings in the 1920s, portrayals of people with cloth covering their faces.

Finally then..

Just for laughs!

...it seems, we have lost something valuable. We have to make up for our neglect and acknowledge it in ways that would have seemed inappropriate before…it is only when pressed to the extreme of experience that this least extreme of relations finds its voice, or when we are forced to consider what really matters, do we begin to consider what friendship is.

Everything is true, Aristotle seems to say, so long as it is never taken for anything more than it is.
Perhaps when genuine good feeling rises above jolly camaraderie or devious influence, and an admiration develops for character over professional achievement, then a virtual spiral of regard can blossom into friendship.  - Andrew Sullivan

In conclusion, the bard wishes good luck to the seeker and asks that he keep safe and flourish in another land where other stories await, hopeful of taking shape.

Soliloquy in the Waves

Yes, but here, I am alone.
A wave
builds up,
perhaps it says its name, I don't understand,
mutters, humps in its load
of movement and foam
and withdraws. Who
can I ask what it said to me?
Who among the waves
can I name?
And I wait.
Once again the clearness approached,
the soft numbers
rose in foam
and I didn't know what to call them.
So they whispered away,
seeped into the mouth of the sand.
Time obliterated all lips
with the patience
of shadow and
the orange kiss
of summer.
I stayed alone,
unable to respond to what the world
unquestionably was offering me,
listening to
that richness spreading itself,
the mysterious grapes
of salt, love unknown,
and in the used-up day
only a rumour remained,
further away each time,
until everything that was able to be
changed itself into silence.

- Neruda