WHEN YOU’RE A KID, YOU colour with reckless abandon. You colour outside the lines. You colour however you feel: blue elephants, purple trees, red bears, green oceans – it’s all good. As you get older, though, everyone tells you to stay inside the lines, to colour everything just like you see it. So you end up painting by numbers – whether you actually paint or whether you write or sing or act or direct.
I think you should create what you feel. Create outside the lines. I want to watch green oceans and red bears. I’d love to listen to purple trees. And I long to read blue elephants.
WRDSMTH
TRICKY!
To say something memorable before you die you either have to say something memorable and then completely shut up until you die – or you have to say something memorable once every five minutes.
GUY BROWNING
MAORI BLESSING
Kia hora te marino,
kia whakapapa pounamu te moana,
kia tere karohirohi i mua i tou huarahi.
May calm spread around you,
may the sea glisten like greenstone
and may the shimmer of summer dance across your path.
BRAINWASHED!
We’ve got a sort of brainwashing going on in our country. Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over. And that’s what we do. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it – and have it repeated to us – over and over, until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all of this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.
Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it. “Guess what I got? Guess what I got?”
You know how I interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I’m sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have.
PROF MORRIE SCHWARTZ (ON HIS DEATHBED) – TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE – MITCH ALBOM
APPETITISING!
We
were
given
appetites
not to consume the world
and forget it
but to taste its goodness
and hunger to make it
great.
ROBERT FARRAR CAPON
AN ORIGINAL!
Why
are
you
trying
so
hard
to
fit in
when you were born to
STAND OUT?
FROM THE MOVIE ‘WHAT A GIRL WANTS’
NO ONE EVEN CLAPPED …
Fuelled
by a million
man-made wings of fire
the rocket tore a tunnel through the sky –
and everyone cheered.
Fuelled only by a thought from God
the seedling urged its way
through the thickness of black
as it pierced
the heavy ceiling of the soil
and launched itself
up into outer space –
and no one even
clapped.
MARCIA HANS – ‘SERVE ME A SLICE OF MOON’
DON’T APOLOGISE
You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were a year, a month, or even 15 minutes ago. You have a right to grow. No apologies.
SICK & TIRED
I think that all
right-thinking people
in this country
are sick and tired
of being told that
ordinary, decent people
are fed up
in this country
with being
sick and tired.
I’m certainly not!
But I’m sick and tired of being told that I am!
MONTY PYTHON
MOOD-CHANGE?
Self-control is strength.
Calmness is mastery.
You have to get to the point where your mood doesn’t shift based on the
insignificant actions of someone else.
Don’t allow others to control the
direction of your life.
Don’t allow your emotions to overpower your intelligence.
JAMES ALLEN
SPACIOUS
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space …
DOUGLAS ADAMS
THE BLANK PAGE
Each day is an empty canvas, and we paint on it as we will. Sometimes we choose the palette, sometimes it’s chosen for us. Sometimes other hands and imaginations may contribute to, or interfere with, our work-in-progress. But we always have a wet brush in hand, and can modify the hues, if not always the composition. And we get to choose when and how to hang the work, and when and how to start a fresh canvas.
The blank page is my final frontier, my Everest. It’s the cell where I’ll achieve transcendence; my cross and my empty tomb; my Emmaus and Damascus roads. Writing is a kind of meditation, a way of prayer. Here I find a forum for angst and intuition. Here I make my confession, and find absolution. Here, where I shed my past, lies my secret map of tomorrow.
MARK LAURENT – SNAPSHOT OF A SOUL IN TRANSIT – WWW.MARKLAURENT.CO.NZ
IN YOUR OWN TIME
If the mountain seems too big today then
climb a hill instead.
If the morning brings you sadness
it’s okay to stay in bed.
If the day ahead weighs heavy and
your plans feel like a curse,
there’s no shame in rearranging;
don’t make yourself feel worse.
If a shower stings like needles and
a bath feels like you’ll drown,
if you haven’t washed your hair for days
don’t throw away your crown.
A day is not a lifetime, a rest is not defeat.
Don’t think of it as failure – just a quiet, kind retreat.
It’s okay to take a moment from an
anxious, fractured mind.
The world will not stop turning
while you get realigned.
The mountain will still be there
when you want to try again.
You can climb it in your own time,
Just love yourself till then.
LAURA DING
UNREPEATABLE
God says, “I didn’t want a world without you. I could have made you different – I could have made you taller or shorter, smarter or slower. But I didn’t want a different you. It’s THIS you that I’ve always loved – THIS you, with your unique fingerprints, the colour of your eyes, the sound of your voice. You are a unique and unrepeatable image of myself … and I love you!”
JOHN POWELL
