Words of Wisdom

Somewhere in the not so distant past I signed up to get daily inspiration emails. I have a few sitting in my inbox, starred and waiting to be archived, but needing to be filed away somewhere because I really liked them.

"You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result."
– Mahatma Gandhi

I tend to overthink. Sometimes it can be helpful, but more frequently it results in inaction and some mild form of paralysis...or the alternative driving myself crazy thinking of too many possible scenarios, outcomes or actions. I like this quote because, well, I think it's true, and I often times forget that while thinking is important, (I highly recommend it to everyone I know...and even those I don't) there comes a point where you have to DO something, because like the quote says, if you do nothing, there will be no result. So do SOMETHING. You don't always have to be right 100% of the time. I mean come on, where's the fun in that? How boring would life be then? Ha, I say this now, but just stick around for when I do things wrong-I'm sure to be singing a different tune.

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity."
– Gilda Radner

This fits quite nicely with the one above. Take the moment and make the best of it. Think and think as much as you'd like, you can't control every minute variable so you can't predict with complete accuracy what is going to happen, but do something, and make the best of it. Life wouldn't be nearly so fun without some of the delicious ambiguity.

"When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure."
– Peter Marshall

I got this quote on a day when I was not my usual happy-go-lucky, optimistic self, and it was definitely a wake up call that so what? Adversity builds character, or something like that. It's like that old saying that God won't give you anything you can't handle. And while sometimes we may wonder what we've done to make God trust us so much, it always turns out right in the end, though "right" may be something completely different than expected. You have to endure the difficulties to make everything else worthwhile.

"The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence."
– Bruce Springsteen

This last quote fits nicely with my firm belief that you have to get older, but nobody said anything about growing up. Let me describe my personality in a few words: happy, optimistic, smiling. While there are absolutely more facets to me, those are the most obvious and most encompassing. I've had people over time question how I can possibly be so happy and positive so much of the time. In fact, I even have a friend who has taken to marking down on his calendar those rare days when I actually get upset about something. The one he has down so far was a ridiculously annoying and whiny customer who called me about 8 times (seriously, no joke), and by the 8th time of giving her the same responses and listening to her same whining and basically her being a spoiled brat who planned to hold her breath until she got her way (which, sidenote, was against our policies and we were not going to change them for a student who thinks she is the queen), I about went through the roof. I actually had to leave the office for about 10 minutes to get the irritation out of my system. But I digress. While many would argue, and I would mostly agree, that I am far more innocent than most of my peers, I am far from being entirely sheltered, and I still keep my idealism. It's like this innate trait that is just there. And I love it. There have been enough things that should have broken that idealism, and sure, it gets bruised every now and then, but I seem to heal and bounce back ridiculously quickly. I simply choose to see life in the glass half full view, rather than the opposite.
I read a post somewhere in the past few weeks in The Happiness Project about shielding your joyous ones. It made a lot of sense, and totally applied to my life. It's an interesting blog, Wednesdays are tip days, they're my favorites. :) Anyways, it was an interesting read, and I got a lot out of it. It basically verbalized things that I have thought and felt, but never really transferred to words, either written or spoken.

Now I realize that my pictures are not always relevant to the posts, but, oh well. My blog, my rules. I think I wrote before about how this was supposed to be a blog for my photos and I was going to have another one just to write in. Clearly I have a hard enough time keeping up with ONE blog, let alone more than one. So I merged the two ideas and decided just to use this one since I'd already started it, and just include a picture or two in each post. This picture is from our sushi-fest the first night my cousin was down to visit a few weeks ago. One of the rolls we ordered was something like the fire-fire roll, and it came with sugar burning in hollowed out cucumber. So bizarre, but really cool looking. It was a tasty roll. Well, the bf (just friends at the time) ate the salmon off the top of mine...can't do the salmon. I like it much better when my dad grills it during the summer, it's so tender and flaky. Absolutely delicious.

Photo specs:
~taken on March 28, 2008
~setting: auto, set to no flash