Ideas won’t keep…

If optimists sail through life, pessimists trudge,

-Marain Sandmaier reviewing Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
by Matin E. P. Seligman

Why do optimists sail? Optimists believe that a setback or misforture is just temporary and caused by something specific. Pessimists trudge because they see a setback as a major disastrous condition that might never improve, caused by something pervasive like a character flaw that won’t ever change.

Which are you? Write about your expectations and attitudes, using specific examples. How would your life be different if you became the opposite type?

If you can’t fight and you can’t flee, flow.

-Robert Eliot

Sometimes you have to look hard at a person and remember that he is doing the best he can. He’s just trying to find his way. That’s all.

-Ernest Thomson

That daily life is really good one appreciates when one wakes from a horrible dream, or when one takes the first outing after an illness. Why not realize it now?

William Lyon Phelps
Essays on Things

Describe your own experience with realizing the joy of “a normal day.” Use an autobiographical or fictional approach. Or write from the point of view of an ill, disabled, or very old person who can no longer enjoy typical daily living.

A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon ruined for himself already.

-Lin Yutang
The Importance of Living

People count up the faults of those who keep them waiting.

-French proverb

Punctuality if the theif of time.

-Oscar Wilde

You’re either a person who’s always on time or you’re not. (How much you’d like to be on time or how hard you try doesn’t count.) Punctuality, or the lack of the same, is a major cause of incompatability among people. What’s the big deal?

Everybody knows how to weep, but it takes a fine texture of mind to know… how to enjoy the bright and happy things in life.

-Oliver Bell Bunce

I achieve a shining serenity if I reach the edge of a body of water.

-Kurt Vonnegut

All his life he was to find the sight and sound of flowing water one of the greatest solacements of grief.

-Elizabeth Goudge
The Dean’s Watch

Be of good courage, all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

There is nothing in which birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and still leave a landscape as it was before.

-Robert Lynd

There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over–and let it go. It means learning what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of the  future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out.

-Ellen Goodman