If You’re Alive…

Look, I really don’t want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you’re alive, you’ve got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you’re quiet, you’re not living. You’ve got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively.

— Mel Brooks

We just decided to go

From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it’s not a miracle, we just decided to go.

— Jim Lovell

There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 in which astronaut Jim Lovell is hosting a dinner party at his house. At some point in the evening he escapes the hubbub of his guests and takes a seat in a lawn chair in the back yard. When someone comes out to join him he utters the phrase above.

The moon landings were the culmination of a gargantuan series of tasks. Thousands of people invested hundreds of thousands of hours coordinating and delivering on thousands of tasks. It wasn’t a miracle that we landed on the moon. We just set our minds to it and decided to go.

Theme of the week: Just decide to go.

Impulse Control

My dad was always trying to make people laugh, often with corny jokes and bad puns. His standard farewell when departing a social gathering was always, “We’ll see you in the spring if we get through the mattress.” Ba-dump, bump! He often proclaimed that he was on a “see food” diet. Reaching for whatever food…

Just Be

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.