Galveston photo (note the brown sand and seaweed) taken on an early morning run, when this thought occurred to me.

“You have an appointment with life, an appointment that is in the here and now.” 

Thich Nhat Hanh

It occurs to me that the focus on other appointments, future or past, distracts from the appointment of central importance – the one “in the here and now.”

Accidental photo. Text from the poem Summer Storm by Dana Gioai. See the full text below.:

Summer Storm

We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.

We hugged the brownstone wall behind us
To keep our dress clothes dry
And watched the sudden summer storm
Floodlit against the sky.

The rain was like a waterfall
Of brilliant beaded light,
Cool and silent as the stars
The storm hid from the night.

To my surprise, you took my arm–
A gesture you didn’t explain–
And we spoke in whispers, as if we two
Might imitate the rain.

Then suddenly the storm receded
As swiftly as it came.
The doors behind us opened up.
The hostess called your name.

I watched you merge into the group,
Aloof and yet polite.
We didn’t speak another word
Except to say goodnight.

Why does that evening’s memory
Return with this night’s storm–
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?

There are so many might have beens,
What ifs that won’t stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.

And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.

Photo taken at my desk at home. Text from a Mary Oliver poem, Blue Iris.

Reading Woolworth’s by Mark Irwin I was taken back 50+ years in time to the Woolworth’s (or what I recall as Woolworth’s) in my home town.  Read the whole poem here:

https://whatworkis.org/2020/08/16/sunday-poem-by-mark-irwin/

But what grabbed me was the last line:

“…because you came here not to forget, but to remember to live.”

It occurs to me that it is easy (but costly) to focus on the forgetting at the expense of the living.  Or as Radney Foster puts it in Half My Mistakes, “you can lean too hard on regrets, but I don’t recommend it.”    

Text is one of my favorites from Howard Thurman. Photo is one of those accident photos, colors enhanced.

“If you cannot do great things yourself, remember that you may do small things in a great way.” Napoleon Hill

It is easy to see greatness in a finished product, easy to forget that the creation was incremental. This quote is a nice reminder that greatness is a culmination of smaller, “bite-sized” components, that appearances aside, greatness is granular. I’m trying to think of an exception and can’t come up with one. The Great Sand Dunes are grains of sand. The Great Wall of China is a collection of grains of materials formed into a wall. A great piano player achieves greatness one lesson at a time, a great writer one word (or one letter, one thought) at a time….

It is easy to be intimidated by greatness. I can’t always be great, but I can be granular. Then the greatness will take care of itself.

Photo taken while looking up at the sky on a recent round of golf. The heavens offered no answer for my slice, only a good photo.

Photo taken recently in Galveston. Text is a nice conundrum from a poem by Tom Hennen.

Mark Twain — “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

He’s correct, of course.  Why suspend critical thinking just because you come to the same conclusion as a lot of others who are also wrong.  History is full of majorities coming to incorrect decisions – getting it wrong.  Hubris is at play here, of course.  “How could we possibly all be wrong?”  Yet we are, with startling frequency.  There are, of course, many egregious examples of the majority getting it horribly wrong, but the one I keep handy, my Exhibit 1, is that photo of the blue polyester leisure-suited me taken in the 1970s.  Harmless, of course, but a gentle reminder of Twain’s point.