Worthy Words

“To get where you are going, you have to have a clear understanding of where you want to be.”

I doled out this piece of advice to my eighteen-year old son this afternoon.  He was working on a last-minute college application.  The funny thing was that when I spoke, I barely looked up from the holiday cards I was assembling for my abbreviated mailing list of card recipients. Yet, it dawned on me that - quite unintentionally - I had uttered some unusually sage advice.  The more I reflected on my hastily offered words of advice, the more I realized I had something going there.  It’s not coincidence that I have an entire file in my Documents that is entitled, “Quotes.” What started as my collection of quotes from other writers and philosophers who are wiser and more talented than I am became an amalgamation of their thoughts as well as my own.  I expect it will be the only time that my words will share a page with the likes of Aristotle, Descartes and Thoreau!

We are, for the most part, more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.   Henry David Thoreau

An unexamined life is not worth living.  Socrates

Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.  Anon

Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.  Drake

Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday.  Skyler Greu

The essence of our love does not change with circumstance or time.  Evans

You think the dead we loved hardly ever truly leave us?

You think that we don’t count them more clearly than ever in great times

of trouble?       J.K. Rowling.

Maybe, one day, when I find myself with a surfeit of time, I will cull all my short, pithy words of wisdom and share them with the world!  It would be a new direction for me.

However, as I once said, “The first step toward change is to believe it is possible.”