Archive for September, 2005

Let go of your legal pad

“The best things in life are not things.” – C. & J. Woods On Sunday, August 28, 2005, as I cleaned Cheerios off the kitchen floor for the 59th time, and just after the contents of a 12.5 fluid ounce glass bottle of maple syrup were ceremoniously unleashed onto that same floor by a 36” tall human tornado named Tess,…
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Save a grocery list

“The palest ink is better than the sharpest memory.” Chinese proverb This luggage tag is what I have left of the ways in which my father’s hands moved and how he grasped his pen, always that blue plastic one with “Modern Barber Shop” on one side and his name on the other as Owner. He’s been dead for 25 years…
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Fund your own revolution

“The American Revolution was not financed with matching grants from the Crown.” – David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear Quick. Look around your office or workspace. Do you have a clock there? Do you have a visitor chair—a chair where a visitor could sit, should one suddenly appear to visit with you? You do? Does it or does…
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Just take it bird by bird

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." – Ralph Waldo Emerson In the past few years, I’m proud to report that I have written several quite successful books under my pen name, Anne Lamott. Okay, I lied.

Replace “they” with “we” with “I”

We all believe in equality, as long as it is equality with our superiors. What is the tipping point? I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that our Social Contract works—that people stop at four-way stop signs and allow the person to their right to move first, creating a sweet dance of understanding and civility. By the fact that social…
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