Quotes of the week

In life, as in chess, forethought wins. ~Charles Buxton

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable. ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Winner, Soviet Writer and U.S. Citizen

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age...The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

The uncommitted life isn't worth living. ~Marshall Fishwick

You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag. ~Edward Koch

Meditation of the week

To err is human; to blame it on the other guy is even more human.
--Bob Goddard

We are on a path that leads us to become better people with greater insight and stronger character. A central theme on this path is learning to take responsibility for ourselves, our mistakes, and our choices as we deal with our situations. We can make progress on this path by noticing our defensive reactions when we make a mistake or when someone criticizes us. Our old ways were aimed at shifting the blame or counterattacking to get someone else off our case. Now we are learning how to take on the blame when it honestly belongs to us.

One of the first things we need to learn in taking responsibility is that there is no shame in making a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. But some people don't accept responsibility for them, and others do. We have much greater respect for someone who does. Admitting when we were wrong doesn't mean speaking in vague generalities, saying that "mistakes were made." It doesn't mean saying, "Yes, I did this, but only because you did that." It means saying what we did or didn't do and laying the facts out there for us and others to deal with. When we can do that, forgiveness almost always follows shortly.

Today I will hold back my defensiveness and admit the facts as they are.

Poem of the Week

Whose hands are these before me
wrinkled, dry and cracked
where for the longest time
there were another two, fair
young and supple?

Yet the same spirit inhabits both,
drives both sets to write
different songs
from the same heart.

Rob Seward
December 2008

Authors of the week

It was on this day in 1868 that the typewriter was patented, by Christopher Sholes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1873, he sold the patent to the Remington Arms Co., a famous gun maker, for $12,000. There had been typewriters before, but they weren't very practical — it took longer to type a letter than to write it by hand. The first commercial typewriter based on Sholes' design, a Remington Model 1, went on the market in 1874.
Ernest Hemingway, (books by this author) loved his Royal typewriter. He kept it in his bedroom so it would never be too far away, and he put it on top of a bookshelf and wrote standing up.
Hunter S. Thompson, (books by this author) wrote on a red IBM Selectric. One of his first jobs was as a copy boy for Time, and while he was supposed to be working, he used a typewriter and typed out, word for word, all of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, in order to learn something about writing style.
Jack Kerouac, (books by this author) was fast at typing, and it frustrated him to have to change the paper so often. So he took long sheets of drawing paper, trimmed them to fit in the machine, and wrote all of On the Road that way. When he taped them together at the end, the manuscript was 120 feet long.