“Be good and you’ll be lonesome.” — Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World I’ve had this quote in my mind for a decade or two, floating about in the back of my brain. It sneaks back to the front now and then, mostly as a taunt to be more adventurous. Some…
If time is precious, how would you react when you take a left turn instead of a right and see your estimated time of arrival immediately jump up 30 minutes? That happened when I turned onto a stretch of Route 76 near Philadelphia with heavy traffic in both directions and nowhere to turn around for…
“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.” ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays We have an opportunity to learn and grow and discover until our very last days. On the other hand,…
“The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.” ― Zhuang Zhou We anticipate what we believe we’ll find in the world, when we get out there to meet it. There’s a level of understanding that comes with…
“Deep in the forest there is something sacred that exists without a perceptible function. This is the central core, the navel of the world, and I want to return to that place.” — Hayao Miyazaki Last month I walked through a forest with several coworkers on a group hike. One of them commented that the…
“Proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job.” — @naval We march through our day-to-day life without serious thought about the big picture. What really…
“I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.” — Mary Oliver, Green, Green is My Sister’s House If we’re lucky, we never really grow up, we just…
“Books and books and books—some five hundred volumes in all. Books of the sea and books of the land, some of them streaked with salt, collected with love and care over more than twenty-five years.Melville, Conrad, London, Stevenson; Gauguin and Loti and Rupert Brooke; Lubbock, Masefield, De Hartog—Slocum and Rockwell Kent; Trelawny and Cook and…
“A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” ― Pico Iyer As I write this a cardinal is singing in the window, driving the cat a bit insane, and distracting me with questions: “What are you doing in your nest? Shouldn’t you be flying?” “I’m busy leaving…
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” ― G.K. Chesterton Admittedly, I’m tired writing this. Two weeks of travel and burning the candle at both ends and I’m worn out. But that’s why we dance with coffee, isn’t it? To press ahead just a bit further….
