7 for Sunday is a weekly serving of 7 things for you to savor. — It’s an email containing my reflections on interesting things I find laying about, seasoned with some quotes from my collection. See https://7forsunday.com/.
The creative mind gets poisoned with the idea that your great work will be the result of getting serious. So many of my good ideas come from what looks like goofing off, wasting time. Art is play. There’s no way to tell what’s deep or shallow until you play with the idea.
~ Austin Kleon
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There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
~ Shakespeare‘s Hamlet
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Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
~ Carl Jung
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Because it’s elitist, an initiation into arcana. Because it’s nostalgic, rowing being a skill not much in demand in the industrial world. Because it’s fragile: The boat club is run on a shoestring, and the beat-up old boats held together by spit. Because it’s dangerous, and exercises the wits against the wind and the water. Because it’s a ritual. Because it’s redemption.
~ Barry Strauss
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Silence is the absolute poise or balance of body, mind, and spirit. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence—not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; Not a ripple upon the surface of shining pool—his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life.
~ Charles Eastman
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Science fiction has the capacity to inspire by setting the vision of a radically better future, and by making it clear that the future won’t happen unless we put in the work.
~ Dan Wang
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If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
~ Haruki Murakami
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The defenders of our freedom have failed to take into account our infinite appetite for distraction.
~ Aldous Huxley
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To-do lists tend to be long; Success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; The other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.
~ Gary Keller
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What is this little, agile, precious fire, this fluttering motion which we call the mind?
~ Prior
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This planet is genuinely strange. If we were all flown to the moon or to Mars and walked around on them, they wouldn’t seem that strange to us because there would be no yardsticks or anything to measure their strangeness by—they’re just vast museums of geology. Whereas the Earth is a deranged zoo, and somebody left the doors of the cages open. We have real strangeness because we can measure the degree to which things are or are not what they ought to be.
~ J. G. Ballard
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I sometimes talk about “moving forward” as a default mindset I have. For example, all other things being equal, go to the airport and wait in the terminal, not a home. But in the end, it all boils down to my having deeply apprehended the lesson that the first 90% of everything is vastly easier than the second 90%. So I generally tend to do-now, rather than wait.
It struck me that this has become a kind of dividing line between success and failure within my team. Those who haven’t worked out haven’t been able to start the clock or return the ball very quickly. It’s not just my team—it’s a source of frustration that fills the letters and dispatches of just about every great general, admiral, and leader throughout history.
~ Ryan Holiday from, You Can’t Succeed In Life Without This Skill – RyanHoliday.net
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Unfortunately, in my case, do-now can become a millstone upon which one can be ground to oblivion.
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Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places.
~ Henry Miller
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Auto-pilot is great. Presuming of course that one understands all the things that one is handing over to be controlled by the auto-pilot. Auto-pilot as a tool for relieving us of drudgery and opportunities for mistakes? Yes, please. As a way to shirk our responsibility to lead our lives in a fulfilling way? Not so much.
The reality is, behaviour change is hard, and many people have not been taught effective goal-setting. For example, someone might know that they’re unhappy and have intentions to change, but they focus on something too broad (‘I want to be happy’) or on what they don’t want (‘I don’t want to be depressed’). An ill-defined focus can lead to trying many things without following through on any one thing.
~ Kiki Fehling from, How to stop living on auto-pilot | Psyche Guides
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I wasn’t taught effective goal-setting, but I’ve got it sorted now. I find it super-effective to not always set clear goals. Set instead, aspirations. Better yet, identify inspirations and regularly update them.
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Be patient. You’ll know when it’s time for you to wake up and move ahead.
~ Ram Dass
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Thinking about consciousness never fails to induce something like vertigo. I always have this sense of myself tipping over into some abyss. I simply, truly, have no idea at all about how consciousness works, or what my consciousness is. All the world is but a dream within a dream?
I think mindfulness’s true purpose is insight into the fundamental nature of consciousness. Mindfulness is good for producing fundamental insights into the nature of mind.
~ Sam Harris from, Sam Harris – The Talks
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That’s a wonderfully concise way to describe it.
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Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’
~ Helen Exley
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Perspective is endlessly fascinating to me. What is it like to look back on decades of one’s own efforts? What’s it like to look back on one’s efforts if they’ve shifted the world?
Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web […]
~ Tim Berners-Lee from, Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter – World Wide Web Foundation
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Well, that’s an ‘I’ statement with a little punch.
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Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words.
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/88
