I AM NOT A BUDDHIST. However, this is one of the most trenchant and immediately obviously true things I've ever heard:

How you do anything is how you do everything.

I will often take a thought/phrase and tumble it over continually in my mind and apply it to better understand things/people/situations around me for extended periods. This will be the next.

Haven't read the article yet but sure loved the quote: God loved us and saved us in His mercy, but He saved us for His glory.

Flawed, obviously, but still fabulous.

I love when things are not what (or why) they at first seem. (Reminds me of fact that, seemingly non-intuitively, Zappos warehouse does NOT stock similar items/brands together - instead the arrangement is nearly random. Why? Is it is easier to spot a red poppy in a field of red poppies (or even red flowers), or against a background of multicolored flowers, fruits, toys and clothes?) There are interpersonal applications. :)

"Yeah but now you know what you mean when you say it."

This is why you need friends who know you better than you do (and care more about telling you the truth than preserving the peace etc... . An inspiration and a challenge).

Someone cut me off the other day and said, "You don't have to say 'because...' " Boy do I like that; taking to heart.

Got this Lao Tze quote from an unlikely source. I think the point is: be vigilant over your thoughts. Indeed.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Shaun White's answer, Magic Lines, the woman doing ferocious double-unders- whining but doing them anyway, Michael Phelps slipping on the pegs and getting right the * back up, everyone shouting and cheering on the bridge at Hackett, the guy in the basement doing burpees all hilariously pouty-faced (but doing them), Derek Jeter standing akimbo, knee cocked, laughing and chucking his friends with his glove during 2005 ALDS Game 4, pitching change top 7, down late in an elimination game but looking like a person waiting for a bus to summer camp, and especially and forever, Trinity at the bottom of the stairs, shaking, hurt and scared but so tough it's past beautiful.

Growing, belated, shame-evoking appreciation for the self-abnegating chivalry and profound decency of one T.A.W. I had forgotten how hard it is. Operates oddly similarly to forgiving.

Those fans seemed to know when the ninth inning started on Tuesday evening that the Yankees were going to win. They seemed to know this in a different way from, say, the hope that floods Fenway Park or Dodger Stadium or Busch Stadium in the ninth inning. Obviously this is only my perception. But it didn’t feel like “hope.” That word suggests doubt or at least hesitation. ...[T]he vibe I was picking up in the stadium was not IF the Yankees would win but HOW the Yankees would win...

This of course made me think of the Hebrews 11:1 kind of hope, bearing little resemblance what we mean & understand when we use & hear that word now. And he's right, especially the "how" part.

Jorge Posada stepped to the plate as a pinch hitter. The roar overwhelmed. ... Seems to me there’s something spellbinding, a blend of sadness and joy, that comes with watching the player who brought you so many thrills, once the bat speed dulls by two-hundredths of a second, once the line drives turn to ground outs, once the old home runs die on the warning track. The sadness is obvious. But there’s joy, too, because, you never know, he might, just might, do it again.

Yes, and THAT bit right there is spellbinding. *tears*

Has any athlete in the history of New York (or the history of anywhere) given fans a more assured feeling than Mariano Rivera? I would suggest: No.

:D

I’m not talking about fans believing. I’m talking about fans knowing. It’s subtle and it could be my imagination. But that’s how I hear it. If Curtis Granderson had made an out, I think a lot of fans would have felt surprise first, then depression.

Also :D . A former boss refused to participate in a Mega Millions pool because he had vowed never to play again after a brief stint in a college dorm pool, during which, after every loss, he was (by his own admission unreasonably) first surprised and then crushed. "I was like, 'Oh MAN, I can't BELIEVE I didn't WIN! How'm I gonna buy that plane now?' I was always devastated." And no, he's not dum... Yalie, HLS, crazily impressive erudite dude who can turn a phrase like no one you've ever heard - I could listen to him talk all day every day, and miss that pleasure. And he's right too - it's funny how some things don't give you any real basis for it and yet you elpis-hope them.

He mentions Carl Crawford. They were talking on sc last night about how he hasn't been running. The psychology of this fascinates me. For years he was utterly unquestioningly self-assured, almost to the point of taking his speed and basestealing ability for granted ("Who's faster than you?" "You tell me!" "No one." "That's right" - no arrogance, no attitude, not even a smile; he simply agreed). But no one was watching at the tin-can backwater stadium where he grew up. Now he is, I would guess, freezing up due to the psychotic fan base that is probably heckling him daily on the street, etc., regardless of how well he might be doing, if others' private reports are to be believed. THIS IS (ANOTHER REASON) WHY PEOPLE WATCH BASEBALL. Yes, flat-earthers: humans, not robots, play the game. I *AGREE* with you and it is a huge part of why I watch.

[Teixeira] is a wonderful player to watch because nothing ever looks too difficult for him. He has the gift.

True, and I love having him here. Radiates decency.

Earlier in the game, [Juan Rivera, who usually does not play first] had snagged a hard-hit Robinson Cano ground ball with Yankees runners on base but it looked like pure luck. On replay it was clear that Rivera’s head snapped up when the ball arrived and his glove only happened to end up in the right place. It was not likely that he would make two plays like that in one game. And, in the bottom of the ninth, with the swirl of expectation all around him, he did not.

This writer has a gift for building suspense and momentum during sentences and passages. I'm certain it has nothing to do with the subject matter but this is my favorite post of his thus far.

...the thing had seemed a sheer impossibility: he had not thought but known that, being what he was, he was psychologically incapable of doing it; and then, without any apparent movement of the will, as objective and unemotional as the reading on a dial, there had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge "about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible." ... there was going to arrive, in the course of time, a moment in which he would have done it. The future act stood there, fixed and unaltered as if he had aleady performed it. It was a mere irrelevant detail that it happened to occupy the position we call future instead of that which we call past. The whole struggle was over... You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he [had been?] delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not, for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject.

No one does "face like a flint" like Lewis.

One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications.

 :)

I am really getting into Out of the Silent Planet. Only p77 and already some moving, beautiful, memorable passages, and some lols which I wasn't expecting.

About his felt "unwonted assurance" that he'd do well in his "post of honor & danger" in the hnakra hunt: "It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible."

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.  You are speaking...as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another.  It is all one thing. ... What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure... When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing.  Now it is growing something as we remember it.  But still we know very little about it.  What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting.  The other is only the beginning of it. ... [T]he poem is a good example.  For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it..."  Deep sigh of satisfaction.  This should be read under a tree while one is being dappled by leafy sunlight.

Courage is not lack of fear, but acting despite it

stand straight in what kills you and confounds you, and break its chains and still believe

Traversing my least favorite square in my least favorite part of Manhattan, nose in bb, I'm overwhelmed suddenly by the ethereal scent of hyacinths. I look up to see dozens of hyacinths in planters, amid the grime, shoving crowds and cacaphony. It feels as though there's some kind of metaphorical lesson in this.

Resolved: to stop even being tempted to make important decisions for negative reasons. I do not need to be driven by fear and in fact I don't even want fears to always be the first thing to reflexively come to mind, however intracellular that has seemed to be for me since attaining sentience ("I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DANCE!!!"). Uncertainty is uncertainty, not certain doom. AND! should a (sensible/educated) risk taken turn out a way that I don't like, it doesn't change the 'rightness' of having taken it. A smart but foiled basestealing attempt does not become unsmart simply for having been foiled, the effusions of everyone who has ever sat near me at a game on such an occasion notwithstanding.

Nice prompt to remember & record D's unforgettable, thrilling, character- and personality-altering response to my complaint about a Swisher bunt (and indeed all bunts): "i know, i'm talking specifics and you're talking generalities; but you assumed the loss of the precious out... it should be used sparingly and smartly, but it is, partly, the surprise that is so beautiful..... and whether it be baseball or comedy, surprise is what we all are after." (If that were in a movie, it'd be both (a) the climactic romantic moment at which everyone in the audience sighed besottedly and (b) on every t-shirt on every hipster in the world. Somebody should get on that)

Canis lupus changed my life. Not even kidding. New favorite run anywhere.

I love the line "Lord, help me be the person my dog thinks I am" (though I believe it'd be more accurate to say "Lord help me be the person my dog is gracious enough to unfailingly *pretend* to think I am"). Similarly I wish I were the kind of person that is implied by the delectable Pink Sugar and Hanae Mori:Butterfly cloud in which I'm presently swanning about.