Small moments

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments – we hear a word that sticks in our mind – or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly – we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed the mallard ducks in the lagoon…

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we could see certain trends emerge from our collection – certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realise that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real – this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story making events of our lives.


---Douglas Coupland,
Life After God

Job vs career

Evidently this new career wasn’t all thrills. There were spills, too, for some, maybe for me. Already I’d noted a few slippery patches. Little jobs had no such peaks and troughs, what you saw was what you got. You did what you were told to do, had as good a time doing it as possible and at five on the dot you forgot all about it. Little jobs didn’t raise ripples in the mind, didn’t disturb the surface at all. A career, on the other hand, seeped into evenings and weekends, popped up even in dreams, in fact took up so much of life that to all intents and purposes it was life, which might explain why it kept coming up with the same kind of questions: what am I here for, where am I going, is what I’m doing right or wrong? And, like life, the answers were never straightforward, often depressing. Very often there were none at all.

--Jill Tweedie, ‘Eating Children’

Come to the dark side,we have cookies

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind."

- Katherine Mansfield