Risks II

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

– Mark Twain

It seems as though Mark Twain was also inspired by the William Shedd quote I posted yesterday.


Taking Risks

A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.

– William Shedd (or possibly Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper)

I taught high school in the early 80′s. I had this quote hanging on my classroom wall in one of those inspirational-type posters with a sailboat setting out to sea. I suppose I was trying to inspire my students to reach for adventure as they launched themselves into the world. I still draw inspiration from these words every time I am faced with the choice of a challenge and an adventure or playing it safe.


Walking

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.

– Ellen DeGeneres


Don’t make them think

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

– Don Marquis

I lived in Denver in the late ’80s. At one point I met an acquaintance who invited me to attend his monthly book club. I was in a heavy reading phase and was excited about the prospect of connecting with fellow book lovers. I was encouraged to bring a book and plan on sharing a favorite passage.

The book I happened to be reading at the time was The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the passage I picked to read turned out to be pretty heavy. You see, the entire short story of Ivan Ilyich is about a man who discovers that he is dying. In his final days he has the painful revelation that he has lived his life as a facade, doing everything that his parents, his family, his church, and his community expected of him, at the expense of being true to that still small voice in his soul. Thought provoking to say the least.

I will never know with certainty why I was not invited back to this small group of literature buffs, but I never heard from them again. Telephone calls to my contacts at the group where never returned (this was long before the days of email and Facebook). No doubt, I came across too intense, for I was wrestling at the time with the very ideas that haunted Ivan Ilyich.

Since then I have learned to temper my intensity. I have also learned that pushing people too hard to make them think can have unintended consequences. It’s okay to make people think they are thinking. Just be careful when you really start to make them think.


Bad Tenants

Underground nuclear testing, defoliation of the rain forests, toxic waste . . . Let’s put it this way: if the world were a big apartment, we wouldn’t get our deposit back.

– John Ross

 

 

 

 


Character

The severest test of a character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.

– Sydney J. Harris

I suspect that this principle of character also applies to the ability to refrain from chiming in when someone in the room is explaining something and you can’t resist what you think is a better explanation. I know that is certainly one of my challenges.


Suburbia

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

– Bill Vaughn


The Illusion of Knowledge

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

– Daniel Boorstin

To really appreciate the profundity of this quote you have to think back to Galileo (1564 – 1642) and his epic battle with the Roman Catholic church over the nature of our solar system. Although Copernicus (1473 – 1543) had developed the heliocentric theory a hundred years earlier, the “prevailing wisdom” maintained that the earth was at rest at the center of the universe while the sun and the planets revolved around it.

But Galileo had a telescope — and became convinced that Copernicus was right. He championed the sun-centric “theory” at great personal risk. He was declared a heretic, forced to recant, and spent the last years of his life under house arrest. The church did not lift its ban on the general prohibition against works advocating heliocentrism until 1758.

Although the true nature of the earth’s place in the solar system was know by they early 1500′s it wasn’t until 250 years later that the illusion of knowledge gave way to reality.

I can’t help but wonder how many other bits of illusory knowledge are blocking true understanding. For example, everyone seems fixated on bailing out the failing banks to restore our troubled economy. But could that be an illusion? What do we really need? We need functioning banks that provide credit to the business world. Does that have to be BofA and Wells Fargo? What if we created a new bank with the trillions of dollars we are promising to these banks?

As an aside, I have read several of Daniel Boorstin’s books and can’t recommend them highly enough. They are thick, heavy tomes that must be digested slowly, but offer rich explorations of our search to understand our world. The Discovers and The Creators are at the top of my list.


Eating

Never eat more than you can lift.

– Miss Piggy

Quotes

A witty saying proves nothing.

– Voltaire

Point taken.

Background on 2009 Calendar Quote-a-Day

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