“If we had no winter spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not taste adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” – Ann Bradstreet
Remember, whatever it is you are going through, whether a cold day, cold marriage, or cold job hunt, you can rest assured it will change. Sometimes you need to do the change to make it happen, sometimes you need to just sit and let the change happen to you. Either way, there are lessons and ideas and growth for you in it all. And there is the opportunity to share those lessons with others and help them grow as well.
“The test of a religion is the number of things it can explain.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
I bet a lot of you do not agree with this. And I bet some of you do! This is a survey. Comment in the blog, on flickr, or if you subscribe via email or a reader, hit reply and tell me what you think. Agree? Disagree? Why.
“The most dangerous creation of any society is a man who has nothing to lose.” – James Baldwin
What do you have to lose? Chances are they aren’t that different from most everyone else. Family, love, hope, future, kids, grandkids, pets, happiness, fun, joy, and way down the list, probably some material things as well.
So, how bereft of everything is the person who has nothing to lose? Did they start with nothing? Did they have it taken away? Did they throw it away? Did they have it stolen from them? Did they have it and take it for granted? Did they hate it?
How does a family, neighborhood, community, society or civilization avoid creating this person? How do you, as an individual avoid contributing to creating this person?
Hello all, if you enjoy the napkin today, you will probably enjoy it tomorrow too! You can subscribe to the blog to come to you via email or via one of many different readers (yahoo, google, etc). Just click on the box on the left to subscribe any way you want! Thanks, Marty
“The artist is nothing without the gift but the gift is nothing without the work.” – Emile Zola
The most important element of this quote is the last word because work is, in the end, the only evidence you have of the artist and the gift.
Creating the work is the tire on the road, it’s the foot on the ball. But the artist doesn’t have one sport or one vehicle they have to use. If you don’t have your oil paints anymore, use watercolor. If you can’t afford stone for your sculpture, use wood. If you don’t have your trumpet, learn the kazoo.
The artist is free because he or she knows their talent, their ‘gift’ isn’t about the instrument, it’s about their brain. It is their mind that makes them an artist, and an artist’s mind can see a ‘work’ in the junk in a vacant lot, the movement of trains over tressles or the sound of clinking glass at a bar.
I use common napkins and kid’s markers for mine, how are you turning your gift into your work?
“I don’t let my mouth say nothin’ my head can’t stand.” – Louis Armstrong
I have nothing to say that this doesn’t already say better! If we obeyed that rule, what a wonderful world…..
By the way, one of your napkinkin (I just made that up), Coco, suggested a good idea about the blog that I am implementing. You might not notice it, nonetheless I appreciate her taking the time to explain her idea to me and I think it is a good one.
Another napkinkin, Kathleen, also gave me some good ideas and I am mulling those over as well!
Thanks to both of them and to anyone else who takes the time to connect with me, whether to talk about an idea on the blog or to give me an idea for improvement. I appreciate them all!
“Some people will never learn anything because they understand everything too soon.” – Alexander Pope
As some of you know, I host my drawings and photography on flickr.com. The most popular napkin on all of flickr is one that is almost indecipherable. It was soaked in water and looks more like a rorschach test than a drawing. I put it up anyway, many years ago, and eventually someone enhanced it a bit and figured out what it said.
I was giving a presentation yesterday (2/24/09) and showed that most popular napkin as I read the quote to the crowd. It suddenly struck me how much I love the quote so I decided I would draw a new napkin to let the quote be easily read this time around!
I love this quote because it is something I see every day. I am guilty of it as well, most people are I think. They are able to comprehend something right away, and they cement that understanding as THE understanding of that thing, event, person, etc.
But each thing, event, person is deeper than a first judgment and if you want the clearest path to really learning about whatever has your attention, the initial ‘understanding’ has to be moved aside. It is like a roadblock keeping you from going beyond it.
Where are your roadblocks and how are they keeping you from deeper learning and understanding?
Are you curious about HOW popular that original napkin is? It is my second most popular image out of more than 2,600 with over 12,200 hits on it! Don’t ask me why.
“Some folks never handle the truth without scratching it.” – Austin O’Malley
What this tells me is that the truth is precious, it is not something to toss around like a frisbee. It is something to be taken care of and treated with respect. Of course, I am not talking about mathematical, scientific or abstract truths, I am talking about personal truth. The person who takes the risk of exposing his or her soul to you, THAT truth.
How you handle those truths is evidence of your character.
“We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.” – Letty Cottin Pogrebin
When I would send my kids out the door to school, I would often say ‘Make good friends and keep good friends’. It became my sign off for the morning. I love the simplicity of it and it encapsulates exactly what a successful day is like. You go about your business with the idea in mind that you are looking to care for someone. You don’t know when that will be, or what form it will take. It might not be something you even realize is ‘care’. You might just laugh heartily with someone over something silly. But to that person, the laughing was such good medicine, so unexpected, that you became a friend without even knowing it. You might listen to a fear that is just one sentence in a long monolog, but you pick up on it and reassure the person later in the day.
Friendship is about awareness and attention for another. The new friends bring that excitement that makes us young, nerves, telling stories, allowing yourself to be seen anew, perhaps reinventing yourself just a little bit for the new audience.
The old friends give us the comfort and assurance that come from us knowing that they know all about us, they know our flaws, our shortcomings, our eccentricities, and they are still with us, they still find value in us, they still love us.
In both ways, the essential nutrient of friendship is resupplied to our souls.
“If there is no God, who pops up the next kleenex?” – Art Hoppe
And not only that, but who takes the socks and hides them, who makes the cat throw up, who eats the last cookie in the cookie jar, who allowed the Brooklyn Dodgers to win a World Series and, most importantly, who, who wrote the book of love?
“It Isn’t Where You Came From, It’s Where You’re Going That Counts.” – Ella Fitzgerald
This can be one of the biggest problems for people. They want to figure out WHY they are the way they are, what in their past made them have this habit, or this response, or this attitude. And at some level it is very satisfying to know, like a puzzle piece that has been found.
But the thing to watch out for here is that memories are not static things placed in a file folder. Every time you remember, you change the remembrance, it becomes more your creation, your story, than it is an exact recording of some past truth. Your memory is not that.
So, let’s say at age 28 you figure out that the reason you never finish anything is because your mother always made you put everything away before you were done. Nice to know. But when you think about that same issue at age 48 you might remember that it was your father who dissed your little creations and made you feel they weren’t worth completing, something you didn’t remember at age 28 because at that point you still thought your father was the perfect man.
Either way, YOU still have the need to learn how to finish things. Remembering either situation did not change your behavior. Only you can do that, regardless of where it came from, regardless of what root path there was to your present moment in time.
While learning all about the ‘back story’ that created you, never lose sight of the real key to your progress in life. It is looking forward, looking at where you WANT to go, and figuring out how to get there, whether it is finally going to China or finally bringing the china out of the packing boxes after 5 years.
