On Time.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past.Edition 281.

Bad Weather by Martin Parr

As the year ends we are all poorer in time but ideally richer in learning and experiences.

Some quotes on time to understand what may have happened in the past and help prepare one to best seize the future…

Time is the essential asset.

“The meaning of life is that it stops”. Franz Kafka

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” Anne Dillard.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

Time and Careers.

“Persistence isn’t just continuing to try—it’s the runway that gives your talent time to take off.” Shane Parish and Barry Demp

“Short-term results come from intensity. Long-term results come from consistency.” John Maxwell

“ I fill the cracks in the road to success made by forces beyond myself” Viviana Andazola Marquez’s

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, but if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details” Jeff Bezos

Time and Aging.

On getting older..

“His face was like a mirror, and it was better not to look” L Annette Blinder

“Only a couple of years had passed in fact. But he looks considerably hammered at by the interval” Anon

“His face was fuller, his center of gravity lower” Anton Chekov

“My guillotine is time” Trevor Moore

Time and Loss.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends, A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” Joan Didion

We will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.” Kathryn Schultz

Time and Impermanence.

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all” Joan Didion

“All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.” Kathryn Schultz

Time and Change.

“I felt myself twisted into a new more complex shape.” Derek Raymond.

“No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life — sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans — tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we’ve learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke and sometimes fate.” Juan Gabriel Vásquez's

“I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
And I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides.

Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.” Stanley Kunitz

On Making the Most of Time.

“The business of life is the acquisition of memories. That is all there is.” Carson from Downton Abbey

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” Joan Didion

Happy New Year!