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Seedthoughts
Bearings: Where am I on my journey in life?

A seedthought is a thought that provokes us to think of something in a new or deeper way. It is a seed for thought and further thought. It has been said that the difference between good poetry and great poetry is this: when we hear good poetry, we may say, yes, I have felt just that way. But when we hear great poetry, we may say, I have felt that way but I never realized it until now. Seedthoughts help us express what we might never have been able to put into our own words. Below are some seedthoughts on the first life question. As an exercise, you might select one that speaks to you and your life and think about it and then write about it.

1. Life consists in what you are thinking of all day. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
   --Annie Dillard
3. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself. . . that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches. --Rainer Marie Rilke
4. If we do not change our direction, we are likely to wind up where we are headed. --Chinese proverb
5. Do you love it? Do you hate it? There it is, the way you made it.
   --Frank Zappa
6. Life is made of marble and mud. --Nathaniel Hawthorn
7. My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.
   --Louis Adamic
8. The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. --Marcus Aurelius
9. Much of successful living consists of learning to make the best of a bad situation. --Martin Seligman
10. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. --Booker T. Washington
11. How can they say my life isn't a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? --Logan Pearsall Smith
12. It is not the arrival, it is the journey that matters. --Montaigne
13. . . . improbability is what life is all about. --E. M. Forster
14. Life is what happens while we are making other plans. --Thomas La Mance

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