❝ You were dealing with pain, but people didn’t realize it.
So many of us have to deal with it. When you’re in pain, you’re just looking to feel good. It changes your relationship with food, and drink, and your life. So then when they fix the pain, you’re left with other complex areas of your life that you need to deal with and realign relationships with.
When I say I’m getting better, I’m getting better in a multitude of ways, which is great… but you have to keep trying. ❞
— Carson Daly, Today (NBC, Tues 18-Oct-2022) re: Life after Spinal Surgery and Recovery
Carson Daly had a great segment on the Today show (NBC) this morning.
I really appreciate his answers and his directness. He did address that many people are in pain, particularly after surgery, illness, or the ravages of age. Many of us are trying to deal with pain, but we’re not always aware of the pain of others.
I especially appreciate how he said that pain changes the nature of our relationships with food, drink, exercise, and our lifestyles. As we recover from the immediate issues and the pain, we need to recognize and realign how our lives have changed.
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
“A still more glorious dawn awaits Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise A morning filled with 400 billion suns The rising of the milky way”
“The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.” ― Mark Twain
CREDITS: A variation of this fable was the story behind an episode of Twilight Zone, named “The Hunt” (Season 3, Episode 19 aired January 26, 1962). Earl Hamner Jr. is the original author of this fable and the screenplay.
A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead. He remembered dying, and that the dog had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them.
After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight. When he was standing before it, he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold.
He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side. When he was close enough, he called out, “Excuse me, where are we?”
“This is Heaven, sir,” the man answered.
“Wow! Would you happen to have some water?” the man asked.
“Of course, sir! Come right in, and I’ll have some ice water brought right up.” The man gestured, and the gate began to open.
“Can my friend,” gesturing toward his dog, “come in, too?” the traveler asked.
The man answered, “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t accept pets.” The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued the way he had been going.
After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road which led through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence. As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book. “Excuse me!” he called to the reader.
“Do you have any water?”
“Yeah, sure, there’s a pump over there.” The man pointed to a place that couldn’t be seen from outside the gate. “Come on in.”
“How about my friend here?” the traveler gestured to the dog.
“There should be a bowl by the pump.”
They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it. The traveler filled the bowl and took a long drink himself, then he gave some to the dog. When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree waiting for them.
“What do you call this place?” the traveler asked.
“This is Heaven,” was the answer.
“Well, that’s confusing,” the traveler said. “The man down the road said that was Heaven, too.”
“Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That’s Hell.”
“Doesn’t it make you mad for them to use your name like that?”
“No. I can see how you might think so, but we’re just happy that they screen out the folks who’ll leave their best friends behind.”
There is a story about Russia in the days of the Czars. In the park of St. Petersburg Winter Palace there was a beautiful lawn, on that lawn a bench, and next to that bench, two guards. Every three hours the guards were changed. Yet no one could explain why these guards were guarding the bench.
One day an ambitious young lieutenant was put in charge of the Palace Guard. He started wondering and asking questions. Finally, he found a little old man, the Palace historian.
“Yes,” the old man said, “I remember. During the reign of Peter the Great, 200 years ago, the bench got a fresh coat of paint.
The Czar was afraid that the ladies in waiting might get paint on their dresses. So, he ordered one guard to watch the bench while the paint dried. The order was never rescinded. Then in 1908, all the guards of the Palace were doubled for fear of a revolution. So, the bench has had two guards ever since.”
—
MORAL:
Every once in a while, it’s wise to ask, “Why am I doing this?”
The modern definition of “insanity” is to continue doing what you have been doing and yet expecting different results.
Are you ignoring years of experience and knowledge only to continue doing what you have always done?
If you want different results, you will have to do something different.
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali(Reading on Kindle Oasis with Kiyomi)
“Read and remember the complete book, not just a section or the end.” — Brad Lafferty to Ken Foreman, discussing Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote
I once had that skill. I had complete books and movies committed to memory. Age, chemo, and senility all contributed to eat away my ability to remember the complete text and context of a quote, scene, film, or book.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Umberto Eco, Dan Simmons, Haruki Murakami, and Robert Pirsig are all among my favorite authors.
The other day, I was discussing Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali in a book group, and I felt like my friend and I were discussing two very different books.
In the book, Dan Simmons writes that sometimes belief systems are “Orthogonal and Opposite” each other. Why Kali was worshipped as both creator and destroyer is so poorly understood by Americans and Europeans despite the Judeo-Christian God both creating the Earth and repeatedly bringing about disasters on those who failed to believe or reveled in sin.
So I’m re-reading the novel this weekend, and discovering that we are BOTH correct. I understood the novel as an angry treatise on faith, my friend understood it as a novel about self-discovery and understanding the nature of our anger & rage for self-betterment.
In the end, I think my friend understood the novel better than I did. So I’m re-reading it now and appreciating it with a new understanding.
Love is patient and kind; Love does not envy or boast; It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
“But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters’ snares.”
“So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it’s a fable, an invention of the pagans.”
“What a disappointment,” I said. “I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what’s the pleasure of crossing a wood?”
IRENE: How many launches are there each day, Vincent? A dozen?
VINCENT: Sometimes more.
IRENE: You’re the only one that watches all of them. If you’re going to pretend like you don’t care, don’t look up.
— Uma Thurman (Irene) to Ethan Hawke (Vincent) in Gattaca (1997)
The Apollo 11 launch and Moon landing were extensively covered in the press. Over 53 million households tuned in to watch this mission on TV, and an estimated 650 million viewers worldwide watched the Moon landing.
The same was not true in 1972, as people were more interested in game shows than space missions. Space quickly became boring.
The same is true of the Space Shuttle program. With 134 launches (133 successes, 1 catastrophic failure resulting in death of all onboard) from 1972 to 2011, Americans and the world lost interest in going to space.
And the same is true of SpaceX. What is today’s novelty becomes tomorrow’s boredom. In Andrew Niccol’s GATTACA, he knew this lesson well, only the truly passionate “watches all of them. If you’re going to pretend like you don’t care, don’t look up.“
People have a limited attention span and care for the truly wonderous.
This September 12th, 2012, photo shows Holocaust activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, 83, in his office in New York. Weisel’s latest book is titled, “Open Heart.” (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
