Feel the feelings but cut short the rumination with the realization that negative thoughts are waking dreams and have no more inherent reality than sleeping dreams.
PROMPT: Negative Thoughts
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Category Archives: Thoughts
PROMPT: Ridiculous
Daily writing prompt
What’s something you used to believe as a kid that seems ridiculous now?
That adults knew stuff and were free to do as they pleased.
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PROMPT: Advice
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
Make decisions 25% more nervy than you currently see yourself having the courage to pull off.
Also, develop some uniquely human skill for the time (you are likely to see) when ai/robotics does all productive tasks better, faster, and more efficiently than humans. (Think nursing, philosophy, sex work, cage fighting, etc.)
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PROMPT: Inspired
Those who reached the escape velocity necessary to truly write their own stories: e.g. Drukpa Kunley, Diogenes the Cynic, Hánshān, Ikkyū, Socrates, and the various Avadhuta.
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PROMPT: Proverb
Daily writing prompt
Share a proverb you think is completely wrong and make your case.
“If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.”
Maybe Muhammad is a beach person. I think it’s just a parallel construction run amok. Everything sounds wise in parallel construction — whether it is or not. “Ask not what your country can do for you,…” “If you can’t change a diaper, the diaper will change you.” etc.
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FIVE WISE LINES [June 2026]
When I was younger I could remember anything,
Mark twain
whether it had happened or not;
but my faculties are decaying now and soon
I shall be able to remember only the things
that never happened.
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled,
Plutarch [paraphrased]
but a fire to be kindled.”
Judge a man by his questions
Voltaire
rather than his answers.
Resist much, obey little.
Walt whitman; “To the states“
People don’t take trips —
John steinbeck
trips take people.
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PROMPT: Word or Phrase
“Popularity contest,” as in “This isn’t going to win me any popularity contests, but…” You know what’s not popular? Popularity contests. I’ve never heard of one. What you are really saying is, “I’m about to be a jackass, and I just want you to know that I’m aware I’m being a jackass.” Just own your jackassery all ready. You can’t soften the blow of being a jackass.
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PROMPT: Minimalist
You own few things and nothing owns you.
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FIVE WISE LINES [May 2026]
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest hemingway; A Moveable feast
Friends do not live in harmony…, but in melody.
Henry david thoreau
Avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.
Robert Hass’ paraphrasing of Bashō [National Geographic; Feb 2008]
Do not hurry; do not rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Be careful of your words,
Lieh Tzu
for someone will agree with them.
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PROMPT: Quote
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” – Mark Twain
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“What you imagine, you create.” – Siddhartha Guatama Buddha
All restatements of one key principle, that our [mental / emotional] experience of the world is an entirely separate thing from the world itself. The latter one has almost no control over, the former one can reach a state of complete control (granted through painstaking and relentless effort.)
