Thought of the day---More "Losing Julia"

"Happiness to me was lying in bed with at night during a thunderstorm and feeling warm and dry and knowing that my mother was in the next room".

"I used to curl up in bed with my dog and read him stores by candlelight."

"You read your dog stories?"

"He was a smart dog."

She smiled, then kicked away some leaves and sat down.  I sat across from her on a rock.

"Happiness is different for adults, don't you think?" she asked.  "Much too fleeting.  Like something you can't see if you stare right at it"

"I think for a lot of people happiness is just the absence of discomfort", I said

"That's not enough for me", she said".

So for today----What makes you happy?  Are you happy?  If not what would it take to give you happiness?  Is it much too fleeting?  Have you ever really ever been happy?

Thought of the day...Love

From "Losing Julia" by Jonathan Hull.......

"Why does the longing for love have to be so acute, like desperate thirst?  Is it because love is wanting to be saved and we can never really be saved?  Maybe love is born of our fears.  Love is the heart's desire for a pain-killer; a tearful plea for a great big epidural.  Yes that's it: love is the only anesthesia that actually works.  And as people with broken hearts are really those who are just coming to, and if you've ever seen someone out of general anesthesia you know that it looks like the beginning of a broken heart.


But to find it and touch it and hold it!  What a relief, if only briefly, until the love wears off or slips through our hands.  Strange how love--that most fickle of emotions--creates the illusion of permanence right from the start, just as beauty, so fleeting and elusive, can seem timeless and infinite to behold.


If love doesn't triumph, it ought to.  For love is the one thing that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from lives wretched absurdity.  The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions."

So, have you ever deeply loved, as this passage suggest love is and can be?  Can love even conquer death?  As Cher asks "Do you believe in life after love"?  Is this kind of love out there for everyone?

Thought for the day

Another quote from "Losing Julia" by Jonathan Hull... there seem to be so many things in this book that are making me really think......

"I can't bear to leave my room today.  I feel altogether too weak......but the weakness that comes with sadness, which is much worse.  I am starting to think sadness is organic; that sad people are cursed with more insight than others.  While our smiles defy our bitter plight, our tears acknowledge it.

Maybe that's why the only people who have really interested me in my life besides children----are those who have experienced the loss of a loved one.  People who haven't felt the caustic burn of death are like students who haven;t yet held a real job; the world is still theoretical; intellectualized, vigorously debated, nut not fully comprehended.

Any search for the deeper meaning in our lives has to start at our deaths.  That's the fundamental overwhelming dilemma of our humanity. But the absurdity of our lives--which I can now only see clearly--is our unwillingness to concede that we are in a bit of a pickle in the first place.  It's quite funny, really: several billion people all feigning immortality, as though they each have some secret exemption, or at least an indefinite future, and thus can not afford to run down the clock without the least sense of urgency.  And the incredible thing is, you can live....and still not make the most of the time you have got."

So are we living fully, making the most of every moment?  If not what is it going to take to make fully living happen?  Do we fear our own death as Jonathon Hull suggests? Not wanting to face our own immortality.