Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.*
Henry David Thoreau

The first thing I learned is that what a seed looks like depends on what it does to survive.**
Austin Kleon

*Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: What does a seed look like?;
**From Austin Kleon’s blog: What does a seed look like?

Bring light to all that is overcast.*
Plotinus

*Plotinus, quoted in John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.*
Oliver Burkeman

Every playground has two basic properties, which are two sides of the same coin: boundaries and contents.
Tim Bogost

Our perception of time alters when we are playful, rather than only being serious, with the contents and the limitations of our lives

Rather than something we possess as a commodity, time becomes something we inhabit.

*From Olive Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**From Tim Bogost’s Play Anything.

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.*
Mary Oliver

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.**
John Maeda

I am grateful for all those who words feed me.

I hope my words feed others.

This is a worthy challenge.

*Mary Oliver, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing;
**From John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity.

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.