Parting Wisdom {That's All Folks)

"Fate is a fancy name we give to the absence of a plan."


"Maybe you're not the best person you can be, but you have the best shot at it."


"Life is a continuing attempt to overcome the personal shortcomings that make us likable."

"You can break up a marriage and remain friends.  It's a harder thing to break up a friendship and remain married."


"There is a point in a relationship where if you haven't told each other your every secret, don't."

"If you never eat a ripe banana until you finish the overripe ones, you will spend your life eating overripe bananas."

"The problem with living happily ever after is that it means the story's over."

Who Be These Strangers?

We are, in the course of a lifetime, many different people, time-sharers of the same mind and body.

~~~

Who be these strangers in my past,

These ghosts from yesterday,

Whose battle scars I carry still,

Whose debts I must repay,

Whose ancient yearnings fill my heart,

Whose mem'ries flood my brain,

Whose sins reside upon my soul,

Forever to remain?

Who be this image in my glass,

This space my spirit rents,

If not a house still haunted by

Its previous occupants.

More From The Miscellany Bucket

What makes the daily moral clash between mind and body so challenging is that the body has no ethics at all. 

It is hard to change someone's mind who believes it in their head bone. 

The intangibles of life not only bring the greater happiness, they require less attic space.

It is often wise, before giving up on a relationship, to try one more degree of separation.

Perhaps worse than never realizing your dream is never having enjoyed your consolations.

One of life's harder calls is whether someone who understands you is ready to hear the rest.

We Stayed Together For The Kids

We stayed together for the kids,

Two kids we barely knew,

Who once upon a moonlit night

Back when the world was new,

Resolved to love forevermore 

And stay forever true.

 

Wait...Say That Again

If you can remember it without tears, it wasn't happiness.

Ever wonder what history would look like if we stopped trying to force everything into chronological order?

I picture myself in a court of law testifying to everything I was taught as a child -- and it's all thrown out as leading the witness. 

If today the world were perfect, with what aching nostalgia would we look back on the Age of Possibility. 

If God is an illusion, then I have this question -- can you have an illusion without an Illusionist? 

You can't look at the night sky without wondering how this tiny enterprise called Planet Earth will ever justify its overhead.

Thoughts on Hope, Old and New

You might, perhaps, give up on yourself, but would you so easily give up on others in your life you care deeply about? And might that be the secret to sustaining hope -- each of us being another's hope? I will not give up on you if you will not give up on me.  

Hope is not a plan, but without hope, nothing else is a plan, either.

Why would you chase a hopeless dream?  Perhaps for the dream. Perhaps for the chase.  Perhaps to meet another hopeless dreamer.

What does a lifetime of hope give you?  It gives you a hopeful life, and in the end, what more can you hope for?

And No One The Wiser

 It is now 65 years since I published my first "aphorism," thus striking off on the tangent that became a life's journey. I had, at the start, a high opinion of the aphorism as an art form, characterizing it as 

"A single sentence that totally exhausts its subject."  

In later years, I became a bit less reverent of the genre, offering the following observation:

"The aphorist finds in every truth a wise saying and in ever contradiction -- two wise sayings."

And today, in the clarity of old age, I offer two candid assessments, including a definition of the word  "aphorism" that I suspect will prove definitive:

"One is more apt to become wise by doing fool things than by reading wise sayings."

"Aphorism:  a truth trivialized by cleverness."

Don't say you weren't warned. (smile)