Imagine driving down the street at 85 miles an hour… Okay that's a bad, potentially lethal example. Imagine driving along the freeway going the speed limit +5, if you live in California +15 miles over the speed limit.
Imagine bombing along, the wind blowing in your hair, your favorite song the radio, sipping a soda and looking exclusively at the rearview mirror. Regrettably too many people live this way.
To quote Crosby stills Nash and Young, “The past is just a good time.”
Gravity pulls us down, magnetism pulled us north and a trickster pulls our leg. In life, living is done between the past and future… a friendly little place called the present.
To quote George Allen, “The future is now.”
As we struggled to live in the present gravity of the past casts a long shadow. It is hard to believe in things that never happened before and of which we have no practical experience or reference point.
To quote Kola NNandadi, “I'd take the gun, there could be a tiger.”
I took a desert survival course with Kola. He was an exchange student from Nigeria. It was hard for him to believe that having water was more important than having a gun, in terms of desert survival. He was correct in his thinking, if he had a gun and you had water, he would soon have both the gun and water… But the class was called Desert Survival, not Mohave Homicide.
The magnetic pull of Xanadu or Shangri-La is just as toxic as a morbid fascination with what has come before.
To quote Burt Bacharach and Hal David, "Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin', planning and dreamin' each nigh of his charms... won't get you in to his arms."
Most beautiful lives are expressed by a faith in the unknowable, dreams of the probable and expressive work to create what we were put on earth to do.
To quote Porky Pig, "That's all Folks."
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