a radical act..................

      Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol.  It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world.  Am I free of such toxicity now?  Well, about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal.  I'll take it.

     Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking.  It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky.  The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground.  So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can.  We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Confuse not.......................

 Now I will tell thee an unusual truth about men and sons of men.  It is this: That what each of us calls our "necessary expenses" will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary.

     Confuse not the necessary expenses with thy desires. . . . All men are burdened with more desires than they can gratify. . . Select those that are necessary and others that are possible through the expenditure of nine-tenths of thy income.  Cross out the rest and consider them but a part of that great multitude of desires that must go unsatisfied and regret them not.

-George S. Clason, The Richest Man In Babylon

Color me confused........................

 Pundits will tell you there is a 40% chance of just about anything occurring at any moment.

The one true bright spot with our current economy is that it's a level playing field—nobody has a clue what is going on.  Ben Carlson offers his take, leading with this quote from the fairly smart and fairly well-read Charlie Munger: "If you’re not a little confused by what’s going on you don’t understand it. We’re in unchartered territory.”