“if the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. if it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. but i arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. this makes it hard to plan the day.”
e. b. white, 1976
photo by jill krementz, from a history of women photographers
Once, Zoe and I went to a wedding of one of her clients. It was a Jewish wedding and it was really beautiful with trappings and traditions I had never seen before. The bride and groom stood under a canopy and the prayers were in an unfamiliar language. At the end, the rabbi had the groom stomp on a wineglass wrapped in a napkin. “May your marriage last as long as it would take to put these pieces back together”, he said. Afterward, when everyone was congratulating the couple, I sneaked underneath the canopy and took a tiny shard of glass from the napkin where it still lay on the grass. I threw it into the ocean on the way home, so that, no matter what, that glass could never be reconstructed, so the couple would stay together forever.
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Sing You Home. Jodi Picoult. (via justcallmelhead) One of the best books ever |
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, comformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
-CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS
