Leeway

"You don't need to decide what you're going to do next with your writing," he said. "You just have to make space for it to happen."

Well, that was smart, I thought, and colorable. Has the koshtra trademark all over it. That guy can be so very plausible, you know? Winning smile, and he seems to have read every single book that's ever been written, but sometimes you wonder if he forgot to let the centerboard down.

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"Nothing about human thought, feeling, and behavior can be understood without acknowledging that humans evaluate events, others, and themselves on a good-bad continuum and try to acquire the personal features they judge as praiseworthy." -- Jerome Kagan, An Argument for Mind.

All categorical statements are false, of course, but I ran into this, quoted in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, and paused on it for quite a while. For a Buddhist, it takes some mulling over.

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Joy comes drifting down, like floss from the cottonwoods.

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The aged opossum who lives under our shed, like so many elderly creatures, has lost track of the days and nights: he walks slowly, stiffly out to get a drink from the water Martha leaves in the front yard, in broad daylight. Then shuffles back to the shed. "I can't worry about crap like dogs any more," he mutters. The cats and crows watch him attentively, but make no move.