Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose our response.*
Viktor Frankl

We have to work with reality, including the reality within.

The five elemental truths identify our limitations:

Life is hard
You are not as special as you think
Your life is not about you
You are not in control
You are going to die.

I often suggest humility, gratitude and faithfulness as the means for playing with reality:

Humility to be our true self (which is a growth strategy)

Gratitude to notice all that we do have

Faithfulness to playing with these in imaginative and creative ways.

Slowly, we enlarge the spaces in which our choices can be made.

*Viktor Frankl, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.

Your inside person does not have age. It is all the ages you have ever been and the age you are at this moment.*
Anne Lamott

*From Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything.

Our grandson’s new game: what’s inside the shaker: lentils, paperclips, pumpkin seeds (he likes saying this very much), beans?

It’s a game for life, of course.

You can’t ever be sure the future will go the way you want. But you can usually (if admittedly not always) be sure that when it fails to go the way you want, you’ll have the wherewithal to cope.*
Oliver Burkeman

*Oliver Burkeman, quoted in Sam Radford’s blog: The wherewithal to cope.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.*
Wendell Berry

*Wendell Berry, quoted in Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything.

Yet without realising it, each day each one of us is visited by beauty. When you actually listen to people, it is surprising how often beauty is mentioned. […] Yet beauty is so quietly woven through our ordinary days that we hardly notice it. Everywhere there is tenderness, care and kindness, there is beauty.*

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Humility is the most important meal of the day.

In other words, man should only play with beauty, and he should play only with beauty.*

*From Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. 

I have different walks for different questions or problems or ideas that I’m dealing with, a whole chain of maybe fifty different walks that I do for different things. 
Iain Sinclair

I can only meditate when I am walking.  When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. 
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

I’m taking a few days out for grandparenting fun and games, but there’ll be a doodle here each day.