Entries by tag: work
"'If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.'"
--John Irving, "The World According to Garp."
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Don't ask what the world needs.
Ask yourself what makes you come alive
and then go do that.
Because what the world needs
is people who have come alive.
--Howard Thurman, civil rights leader
Ask yourself what makes you come alive
and then go do that.
Because what the world needs
is people who have come alive.
--Howard Thurman, civil rights leader
Medicine is "like working in an auto repair shop," writes veteran internist Brendan Reilly. "You listen to what the car owner says; you ask him some questions; you listen carefully to his answers; and then you look under the hood. People today think medicine is all about technology -- DNA tests and MRI scans and robotic surgery. But it isn't. There's an age-old, tried-and-true method to clinical medicine, and there's nothing mysterious or high-tech about it. It's grunt work.... If you shortcut the grunt work you'll screw up the job."
Downward facing dog aka Adho Mukha Svasana. Re-invigorates the person who has settled into a slouch. Enlivens the gaze. Practice for at least five minutes after 4 hours of sitting. Ok to play with it, go into Wild Thing or whatever variation makes you happy. Try getting around on all fours--feet and hands, no knees. The dog knows how. The heart is the center for this asana.
I hold the most archaic values on earth; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.
--Gary Snyder
--Gary Snyder
It's only work
if you'd rather be
doing something else.
--Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby)
For me, the study of medicine could take over my whole life.... I want to do it, and the information comes to me in great floods which I try to understand and sort through so as to be able to apply it.
if you'd rather be
doing something else.
--Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby)
For me, the study of medicine could take over my whole life.... I want to do it, and the information comes to me in great floods which I try to understand and sort through so as to be able to apply it.
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.
Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.
-The Talmud
Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.
You are not obligated to complete the work,
but neither are you free to abandon it.
-The Talmud
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
--BY ROBERT HAYDEN
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
--BY ROBERT HAYDEN
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