Daily writing prompt
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
Change your relationship to sensation.
Feel it all but stop assigning it meaning and value judgements.
PROMPT: Best Advice
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Tag Archives: attitude
FIVE WISE LINES [August 2026]
One can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge,
Michel de montaigne
but one cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and one must begin anew.
Julio Cortázar
Experience is not what happens to you,
Aldous Huxley
it’s what you do with what happens to you.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.s. Eliot
If we do not possess a ‘sense’ for a given energy -form,
Robert E. Ornstein in The psychology of consciousness [As quoted in the Bihar School edition of Hatha Yoga Pradipika]
we do not experience its existence.
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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.)
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Soul Deaf [Lyric Poem]
As I've traveled around the globe,
I've felt the music from some souls --
Those who exude, in part or whole,
a secret and sacred rhythm.
And when their tunes did call to me
I felt a yearning to be free
to dance and sing, if out of key,
yet ever so resonantly.
Who could have known that I'd go deaf.
With ear to ground, nothing was left.
It felt like a horrible theft
from all (and yet received by none.)
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Mobile Home [Common Meter]
Turtle exits its hiding place
beneath a rotten log.
Its shell snags on that old, dead wood
he drags the log along.
Does he know that he's double-shelled?
He seems so unaware.
When he breaks free, he gains no speed --
just crawls on like he don't care.
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Ignorance is Bliss [Lyric Poem]
A turtle swims to water's edge,
and finds before him a steep bluff.
He makes himself a solemn pledge,
"I'll scale this cliff, however tough!"
Struggling over the toilsome rim,
he sees another wall of stone
stands just ahead - tormenting him.
"Just one more, I'll not piss and moan."
If he could know that it was stairs,
He'd have some turtle curse words to share.
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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: Gratitude
Thanks for asking!
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PROMPT: Good Life
Daily writing prompt
What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
Right mind, healthy body, and good company.
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FIVE WISE LINES [June 2025]
…we should not be too confident in our belief of anything.
cicero; tusculan disputations
No matter what plans you make,
Rumi; Mathnawi II
no matter what you acquire,
the thief will enter from the unguarded side.
Be occupied, then, with what you really value
and let the thief take something less.
Very little is needed to make a happy life;
Marcus aurelius; Meditations
it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
I possess, but I am not possessed by her;
aristippus [according to Diogenes laertius in
since the best thing is to possess pleasures
without being their slave,
not to be devoid of pleasures.
lives of the eminent philosophers]
Do not fear the gods.
philodemus; Herculaneum papyrus
Do not fear death.
What is good is easy to attain.
What is painful is easy to endure.
[Often referred to as the four cures of epicurus]
