Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
Also: Quiet by Susan Cain; Water Margin by Shī Nài’ān; and Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“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.)
Let the flood sweep
one away — out
of the shallows,
into the deeps.
Don’t ever cry;
Don’t ever weep;
Just feel the speed
Carry one on.
The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth by Thomas JeffersonEPIPHANIES.
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.)
With a big-R, it’s a philosophical and artistic movement that served as a counterweight to the Enlightenment by advocating for Idealism (versus Materialism) and spirituality (if not necessarily religiosity.)
With a small-R, it’s the skill or proclivity to advance conditions for amorousness.
That’s why capitalization matters.
To surrender to my ignorance. If one can never know exactly what game one is playing, it becomes much easier to avoid getting worked up about whether one is playing it right or whether one will “win” or not.
My wife, movement, new & interesting ideas, play, and epiphanies.
[I’m presuming we’re using the word “thing” in the broadest possible sense — as a stand in for any noun. If it is meant in the narrower common usage of trinkets, gewgaws, baubles, and tchotchkes, then I’ve got nothing.]
Have epiphanies. They are quite hard come by.
A Buddha / Bodhisattva (if there’s one about these days.) Why? To feel how his (or her) subjective experience compares to my own.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 