Category Archives: Life

PROMPT: One Small Improvement

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Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
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Use a timer to create distraction-free zones in your day. When you’re working on a task, set the timer for some reasonable time (say, 1 hour.) [Do not try to do many hours at a time, you should move and ruminate on a regular basis.] Until the timer goes off, social media doesn’t exist. YouTube doesn’t exist. Snacks do not exist. Visitors do not exist. Phone calls don’t exist. Texts don’t exist. Only the task at hand exists, and only dire emergency should be allowed to interfere. This facilitates Flow.

“A Question” by Robert Frost [w/ Audio]

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A voice said, Look me in the stars
 And tell me truly, men of earth,
 If all the soul-and-body scars 
 Were not too much to pay for birth.

PROMPT: Freedom

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What does freedom mean to you?
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Of the universe of all possible actions, one can choose to attempt any (or refrain from any) but those curtailed by a small number of laws intended to keep one from impinging upon the freedoms of others or imposing costs / burdens on them to which they did not consent, or by self-imposed limitations (e.g. one’s own ethical belief system or one’s physical / mental limitations.)

Often it is wrongly confused with comfort. A maximally free society is not maximally comfortable for anyone, because one has to accept that others will make all sorts of choices that one would not make oneself (and that it’s none of your business.)

“Climbing Mt. Xian with Friends” [与诸子登岘山] by Meng Haoran [孟浩然]

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Human affairs ever grind on --
  Ancient or modern, shit repeats.
 Mountains and rivers are changeless.
  We climb to find our vista seats.
 Cascade, fisher, and bridge -- subdued;
  Air grows cold near dreamy, deep pools.
 We read an old stone monument,
  As tears glisten on cheeks like jewels.

Original Poem in Simplified Chinese:

人事有代谢， 往来成古今。
江山留胜迹， 我辈复登临。
水落鱼梁浅， 天寒梦泽深。
羊公碑字在， 读罢泪沾襟。

Note: This is poem #125 from 300 Tang Poems [唐诗三百首]

PROMPT: Career Plan

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What is your career plan?
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Hah. That ship has sailed. But I could say that it’s to still have something to offer when machines / AI can do all productive tasks better and / or faster than humans — i.e. to be able to convey something of the art of being human. Even though, I suspect, I won’t be around to see that day, it will be catastrophic to the species if people don’t figure these things out in advance — i.e. if we don’t figure out human roles and purpose in a post-human industrial landscape.

PROMPT: Live Performance

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What was the last live performance you saw?
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A local theater group’s performance of “My Fair Lady” a couple months ago… Unless, you count several minutes watching a group of fire jugglers on the beach in Krabi.

FIVE WISE LINES [May 2025]

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It is a happy talent to know how to play.

Ralph waldo emerson

Just living is not enough… one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

Hans christian andersen

Don’t abandon kindness, mercy, and sympathy in an emergency.

Qiānzì wén [千字文], Ch. 3

Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

albert Einstein

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Henry david thoreau

PROMPT: Job… for a day

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What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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“Maker of pies” leaps to mind, but then it occurs to me that any baker who worked at it for just a day would be the worst. It seems to me that any job that is interesting would be one that a person would be terrible at if that person did it for only a day. Conversely, any job one could successfully do for just one day would be tedious and unrewarding.

PROMPT: Favorite Holiday

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What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
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Probably New Years as it’s the only one that there’s some excitement about no matter where one is in the world — even nations that have their own calendar celebrate it as a secondary new year. No use in getting too attached to single-country holidays if you’re a traveler, it just creates melancholy.

Also, because it’s not one of those roaming holidays that’s on a different date each year. Those are too hard to keep track of.

PROMPT: Camping

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Have you ever been camping?
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Many a time, and I hope to do more. I highly recommend the experience. Nothing like sleeping close to the Earth to realize that there exists no patch of ground on the planet as flat and rock-free as one’s mattress.