Look at a flower....

......Look at a tree. Look at a bird. Look at a mountain. Look at any example you choose to, but look please at nature. How beautiful it is, how magical, how breathtakingly intricate and how awe-inspiringly graceful. Now, look at yourself. Who are you? What are you? You are a part of nature.

You are every bit as magnificent and majestic as that flower, tree, bird or mountain.

Too clever is dumb.   (Ogden Nash)

People see....

.....what they want to see.  How, then, are they ever persuaded of anything? Well, when you need to make someone see things from your point of view, you first need to find out what their point of view is. Then you have to convince them that, in supporting your idea, they are actually confirming their own. 

Now where, you may wonder, does argument enter into any of this? It doesn't! Argument is only for people who actively want to grow further apart.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.   (Horace)

Are you losing...

....your enthusiasm?  Do you feel that you can see through the emperor's new clothes? And would you really, rather be spared this less than edifying view? You can't pull the wool back over your eyes, once it has been raised! You can't narrow your mind, once it has been broadened. You can, though, regain your optimism and your faith, no matter how many times it has been beaten out of you by the relentless march of mediocrity and indifference. 

We seemingly live in a world full of people who aren't just happy to settle for second best, but are thoroughly delighted to embrace it as if it were the finest that life has to offer. We all deserve to be pickier than that.

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.    (Ray Bradbury)

How can we....

....make the world a better place? It has to be partly by recognising how much is wrong with it. But we also have to be objective. We won't help if we complain without taking action... nor if we rail against things that are actually understandable or even, in a slightly different frame of mind, acceptable. We have to make sure that we campaign only against the most severe transgressions.

Often we become more upset than we ought to be about a matter that really doesn't matter. Save your energy for a battle that's truly worth fighting.

We will not have peace by afterthought.   (Norman Cousins)

Sometimes, the only way....

....to get it right is to risk getting it wrong. If we try too hard to be wise, we risk making ourselves look foolish. Those who want perfection in all things will only ever fail.  The truly wise understand that there is no shame in accepting that you don't know the answer to a question and that, indeed, you may never be able to know it.

Only fools imagine that all the answers are attainable.

Love is never wasted or lost, the person may be gone, but their love is with us forever

Something to give away, and still keep....

Why limp....

.... through the door to the future, clutching a big bag of clothes that don't suit you, dragging behind you a cart of other people's problems that they have asked you to help carry? The door is only so wide. With all that baggage, you may not pass through.  You may have to wander round in a kind of eternal version of yesterday...

...until or unless you put down what you no longer need.

Make a commitment to be a master of change, rather than a victim of circumstances.     (Brian Tracy)