Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Learn how to approach today's adventure

"Finish each day and be done with it... You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as
you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it well and serenely."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would put it differently. When you go to bed at night, forget the day before even happened. The good things in it will linger and give you pleasant sleep anyway. The bad things are best left in the history in which they happened.

Tomorrow is not just a new day. It's a new life. Anything in your memory (and that's all yesterday is) deserves to be forgotten until it can be revived with the benefit of filtering mechanisms applied to long term memory, thus producing "the good old days."

Nothing you can do will change what happened in your past. You can do things today that will affect your future, but even those will be mediated by events which cannot be foreseen.

Live today as if it's the only life you will have.

Do I mean to live in an existentialist way, in a hedonistic style? No, because you still have to account for your actions when you lie your head on your pillow. No head rests easy on a pillow when the previous day involved deception.

No matter what you may have heard.

You have to learn what "today" is all about before you can live it fully and beneficially. That requires experience and learning. Today is a mystery, whether a pleasant adventure, a comedy or a tragedy. You have to learn how to be an adventurer before you can adventure successfully. It doesn't happen by accident any more than anything else in life.

Only the wise adventurer can make the most of any new venture. The wise adventurer has learned from past ventures. The wise adventurer know how to approach each new daily adventure.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to help you become an experienced and wise adventurer.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl

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