“It is a good thing to be rich, it is a good thing to be
strong, but it is a better thing to be beloved of many friends…and to be
really, really rich”
-- Euripides (480-406 BC) Greek Playwright
OK…I added the part at the end.
Thankfully most of them make sense, and often times they even resonate…especially the ones that remind me
of my own shortcomings. A consistent theme of many of the inspirational quotes
is about personal responsibility…and as someone that wastes way too much time
lamenting my status as victim, it’s nice to be consistently reminded by people
wiser than me that I’m almost always the architect of troubles I’m all too
eager to blame on anyone but me. While I love the quotes my good buddy sends over, he's not the only source for great inspirational sayings.
I picked up this book at the
local bookstore Politics and Prose about six months ago that I just started
reading the other day (it took me six months to finish the 300+ page “How to
Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age”
that I’d purchased in January of 2013). It’s called “This
Thinking Life” by a Ph D from Johns Hopkins named P.M. Fiorni. I know what
you’re thinking right now…Zzzz. But he actually wrote a couple of books
about civility (one called “Choosing Civility”) that helped me recognize how
often I fail to pick that preferred course, so when I spotted his new book
about the value of making time in our otherwise overbooked lives to simply
think, it somehow caught my eye.
Early on in the book there’s a quote by a cat I’ve never
heard of named Michael Altshuler that appears in the beginning of a chapter on
carving out time to think. The quote is simply this…
“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the
pilot.”
--Michael Altshuler - (no B.C., A.D. or C.E…must still be
alive) Motivational Speaker
Dammit. Here we go again. Most Fridays I spend an hour
writing this crappy blog at the crack of dawn and like to use this time to
whine incessantly about the highly unfair and ever escalating passage of time.
Now, along comes this self-help sales seminar sh*thead implying that I
actually have some control over how I allocate the hours and minutes of my life.
It’s so much more convenient to
cry about all the demands on my waking hours…feeling often like I have
literally no discretionary time to do the simplest tasks…let alone the luxury
of just kicking back and thinking. Heck (that Fargo thing is lingering), I
can’t even watch television anymore without my laptop open. I’m on the internet
constantly…never unplugged. My high-powered job essentially demands
connectivity 27/7 (yes…I added 3 hours to the day. Had to, to get things
done).
But you see…that’s the thing. If I really think about the
stuff I’m looking at on the internet, most of it is crap (and that’s just the
stuff I’m admitting to). I see an actor in an old movie and look up if he’s
dead or alive. I see the old blonde waitress from Cheers on Modern Family and I
hit up Wikipedia to find out she’s 65. I hear a commercial about Shaun T
helping people lose 200 pounds and 10 inches via the latest P90X knockoff scam
and I google it (just a side note here…but are there people that are still
amazed you can get in shape if you convulse in front of the TV like a maniac
every day for 45 minutes over the course of 90 straight days? Do you need to
purchase CDs for that? The little underwear dude with the Dolphin running
shorts, squeaky voice and really bad perm taught us all that years ago…and all
he was doing was dancing to oldies).
During the holidays I received a call on Christmas Day from
my cousin that my 90 year-old aunt was near death in Moorhead, MN (see previous
post). My aunt who’d been in a rest home for four years, stopped eating and
drinking and the medical folks said she’d likely last a week to ten days.
Now,
I’m way too important to just drop everything and schlep my 84 year-old mother (who was staying with me for the holidays) to
Fargo, ND (Moorhead’s twin city) to deal with her sister’s death and funeral
arrangements, but that’s what I did. Not really sure why to be honest, but
despite my preoccupation with being indispensable in the office, I’m not even
sure anyone really noticed I was gone. I pretty much unplugged too (at least by
my standards)…and to be candid, other than getting markedly more relaxed,
nothing really seemed to change.
“You’re already in the cockpit…so you may as well grab
the controls.”
--It’s Friday Blog Author (1961-still barely kicking ) Really
Bad Writer
Have a great weekend, and ease back on your airspeed by
starting your Friday with some relaxing music I’m betting you haven’t heard.
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