When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?
Ron Burgundy, because he’s a legend, and the legend continues.
PROMPT: Successful
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Category Archives: Thoughts
PROMPT: Principles
What principles define how you live?
Before traveling, empty my cup. Before returning home, empty my cup.
Collect experiences, not geegaws.
Wishing for the world to be some other way is a grand waste of time.
If there is a river flowing toward where I want to be, surrender to it.
See humor everywhere, especially in myself.
Be content with who I am at the moment, while struggling to be a better version in future editions.
Strive to find the non-adversarial path.
Keep looking until I see what is beautiful in all things and creatures.
Don’t attempt to construct anyone else’s list of principles to live by.
Feel the sensations that arise without letting the mind amplify them out of proportion.
Seek only simple pleasures, enjoy them fully, and then move on.
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FIVE WISE LINES [October 2025]
I had better never see a book
ralph waldo emerson; The american scholar
than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit,
and made a satellite instead of a system.
Free should the scholar be, — free and brave.
Ralph waldo emerson; The American Scholar
If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal.
Paulo coelho
What you’re supposed to do when you
Maya angelou
don’t like a thing is change it.
If you can’t change it,
change the way you think about it.
Don’t complain.
No man ever steps in the same river twice,
Heraclitus
for it’s not the same river
and he’s not the same man.
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PROMPT: Changed Mind
What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?
Oh so many things over the years. The biggest / most fundamental being the likeliness of the existence of a god or gods. The smallest being the relative appeal of toast.
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PROMPT: Lesson
Few things in life matter as much as they feel they do. Almost nothing is perilous, while many things feel as though they are. Don’t let illusory feelings keep one from living boldly.
Or, as the Epicureans liked to say, “What is painful is easy to endure.”
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FIVE WISE LINES [September 2025]
The aim of introduction is to conceal a person’s identity.
George Mikes, How To Be an Alien
From the beginning our philosophers have tried to teach us how to die,
Jonathan weiner, Long for this world
and our poets have taught us that to contemplate death
is to learn to live.
Nothing is harder to see into than people’s natures.
Zhuge liang [a.k.a. Kongming], The WAy of the General
To know how to eat is to know how to live.
Auguste Escoffier
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark twain
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PROMPT: Traveled from Home
Daily writing prompt
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
”Home” and “away” lost all meaning long ago, becoming a false dichotomy. “Furthest” is likely presumed to mean the most distant in space, but that is not always the greatest mental distance. Sometimes a place changes while you were away, and that shift through time becomes the most jarring distance.
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PROMPT: Habit
Daily writing prompt
What daily habit do you do that improves your quality of life?
I poop. Surely, I would have exploded in my youth if I hadn’t developed the habit. I feel my quality of life as a human must be better than the quality of life of gut bacteria in wall-spattered fecal matter. At least I have the leisure and capacity to contemplate such things.
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PROMPT: Writing
EPIPHANIES.
But, if you think about it, writing is miraculous. In the scheme of gifts that nature grants, it is way out beyond left field. Encoding ideas and images in simple characters in a way that can evoke emotional or cognitive responses in readers is kind of a superpower. (As is reading.)
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PROMPT: Profession
Nurse. I think it takes a tremendous level of humility and compassion. Also, I suspect it may be among the last handful of human jobs (as we know them now) to still exist once AI-robots start doing pretty much all productive tasks better, faster, and more efficiently than humans. I think long after our doctors are machines, we will have human nurses.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 