Most Predictable Thing

It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.

-- Randall Munroe (1984 -), American cartoonist, author, and engineer, in xkcd 1477

The Future Beckons

The past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. 

-- Jawaharlal Nehru (1889 - 1964), principal leader of the Indian independence movement in the 1930s and 1940s, prime minister for 17 years, Tryst with Destiny speech (14 August 1947)

Truth And Right

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

   The flying cloud, the frosty light:

   The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

   The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

   The civic slander and the spite;

   Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

-- Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809 - 1892), Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850)

Avalanche

Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering.

-- Donald Edwin Westlake (1933 - 2008), American novelist and screenplay author, "Interview with Donald E. Westlake, Author of What's So Funny?" by Scott Butki, at Blogcritics (2 May 2007)

Anticipator

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it.  A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator.  It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future.  And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.

-- Daniel Clement Dennett III (1942 - 2024), American atheist philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist, Kinds of Minds (1996)

We Do Not Rest

We do not rest satisfied with the present.  We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight.

-- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), French mathematician, logician, physicist, and theologian, The Pensées (1669) (literally "thoughts") Section II The Misery of Man without God, 172

Fulfillment

Yesterday, on Christmas Eve, I made about 30 dozen cookies and candies.  The Christmas cookies were decorated by my grandkids.  I kept a plate of cookies, and 10 plates went to kids, neighbors, and friends.

A good group of people came around today to celebrate Christmas with a gift exchange and a big meal, topped off by pie.  I don't always enjoy every minute of the work that goes into it while I'm doing it, but I wouldn't miss it.  The work provides personal fulfillment.  With the kitchen cleaned up and the dishes put away, I'll go grab a slice of sweet potato pie.  Merry Christmas, everyone.