A Man With a Plan
I ain’t Martin Luther King. I don’t have a dream, I have a plan.
— Spike Lee
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.
Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
Sometimes the best thing we can do is to stop “doing” and just be. You don’t have to “be” anything. We don’t have to “be” quiet, or productive, or useful, or nice. Just be.
In his brilliant album that gave music and lyrics to Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Neil Diamond wrote:
Be, as a page that aches for a word that speaks on a theme that is timeless.
Whatever you’re doing now is just a stepping-stone to the next project or adventure. Any rut you get into is one you can get yourself out of.
— Timothy Ferriss, 4-Hour Work Week
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
— Carl Sagan, astronomer and author (1934-1996)
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
—James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)