Thirty Thousand Days: A Journal for Purposeful Living: Spring 2015

Table of Contents with Quotes

You Are Not Drowning by David Berkun

Socrates never said “I’d do great work if I didn’t have philosophy overload from hanging out at the agora.” Emily Dickinson didn’t complain of vocabulary overload in the English language. Picasso, Da Vinci, Tesla and Marie Curie all possessed amazing curiosities and could have easily been distracted away from their work by the abundance of sex, food, conversation, money, news, books, and paintings in their lives. Yet they worked. They produced. Van Gogh was mad and starving and still he produced.

 

His Weirdness by Brian Doyle

See, that’ll all be gone when he goes, and that’s what makes me cry at night. Mostly we just try to enjoy the time we have left, but sometimes I think ahead to when the sink will be totally clean in the morning, and that will be awful, or the bread won’t have white holes where he’s cut off pieces of crust the size of a quarter. What kind of raving lunatic would do such a thing? Only him. People think what we’ll miss most is his humor and kindness and all that, which sure we will, but lately I think what we’ll miss the most is his weirdness. His weirdness is what he was.

Unbox Yourself by Gregg Krech

If today is not that day, then when is that day? Can you afford to wait until all the ingredients present themselves, neatly aligned on your coffee table – a day with no errands, good health, a rested body, nice weather, clarity of purpose, inner passion, all the money and tools that you need, the support of your family, friends, your Congressman and the Dalai Lama? Can you afford to wait for that day?

 

Run Away by David Whyte

To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship; from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. We are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans strangely, when part of us does not want to be here, or does not know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up.

 

Don’t Figure Others Out by Norman Fischer

No one has the capacity to figure others out. And yet we do figure them out – or think we do. Then, based on that mischaracterization, we react.

 

Curiosity to the Rescue by Linda Anderson Krech

So here is the crux of the matter, which I think we all know but tend to forget: persuasion and pressure are not at the heart of good problem-solving. Listening is. Fair-minded, open-hearted listening.

 

You Can’t Hurry Love by Daniel Goleman

There was an important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes and we don’t at other times.

 

The Pizza Party Team by KiKi Latimer

It soon became apparent that even though we only scratched the surface of whom was involved under each category, thousands of persons were involved in getting that pizza from the farm to our doorstep! I think that for all involved in this assignment it was an eye-opening experience. No one had ever really considered such things before.

 

Naikan with Prisoners by Yoshinori Sato

He was able to verbalize, with remorse, that he has harmed others and it is necessary for him to be  humble and not react with anger when he is disrespected or provoked by others.

 

Look Before You Leap by Morris Sullivan

You might say you leap before you look—you take a leap, and then see how that worked out, and then execute a series of leaps that will take you where you want to go.

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So this is where we find ourselves: right in the middle of a dilemma. And it leaves us with some provocative questions: How can we live wholeheartedly in the face of impermanence, knowing that one day we’re going to die? What is it like to realize we can never completely get it all together? Is it possible to increase our tolerance for instability and change? How can we make friends with unpredictability and uncertainty – and embrace them as vehicles to transform our lives?

– Pema Chodron

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