STOP-STEP BACK & REFLECT. . .

Gentle reader, lately I have been spending time reflecting on ‘Endings & Beginnings.’  This morning I have decided to invite you to STOP, STEP BACK, WITHDRAW, REFLECT & THEN RE-ENTER.

In order to help you engage this process I will provide eleven quotations.  One or more of these might ‘speak’ to you and thus provide you with an initial stimulus for reflection.  I offer these in no particular order; I have found each of them – at one time or another – to provide me with a stimulus for reflection.

• The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn them. –G.K. Chesterton
• Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! –André Gide
• There is a time for departure, even when there’s no certain place to go. –Tennessee Williams
• I know that most [people], including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. –Leo Tolstoy
• How many times man lives and dies…Between his two eternities. –William Butler Yeats
• Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are. –Marcus Aurelius
• Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow. –Goethe
• The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become. –Charles Du Bos
• The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born, when we die, although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. –Erich Fromm
• Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you… Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition. –Florida Scott-Maxwell
• We all must be serving something or someone, who or what are you choosing to serve? –Maya Angelou