# (1) 17 Aug 2010, 12:36PM: Fortune:
There are tools and applications and widgets and whatnot that are meant to be fed a text file full of quotations so they can show you one every time you log into a website, or onto your computer, or put one randomly in every email signature. The old-school name for the file full of quotations is "fortune" or some variant. The idea is that it's like opening a fortune cookie. Right now I'm benefiting from the wisdom some friends have shared with me. A selection:
...on embarking on something completely beyond what I normally encounter in life, I've started thinking and/or saying, "Well, what the hell, at least I'll earn some XP."
Part of the pleasure of starting again is feeling the years and years of riding behind me -- the teenage bolting around like a lunatic and learning how to land on my feet, the years in my twenties when David drummed cadence into me -- coming up and helping, like a whale surfacing under a struggling swimmer. As if those years weren't wasted after all; as if all is not lost.
...sometimes it's easier to cry about smaller things.
If the people you're with notice you're eating your pasta wrong, you're with the wrong people. I don't understand why we, as a society, always want to put intensely complex arrays of emotionally significant things into tight boxes. The world does not work that way.
And one less personal insight, but one that speaks to me powerfully whenever I find myself wearied by intra- and inter-personal growth: Captain Jonathan Archer (yes, from Star Trek: Enterprise), inspiring the fractious diplomats and keeping them from scuttling the interplanetary equivalent of the League of Nations:
And yet the more I've experienced, the more I've learned that no matter how far we travel, or how fast we get there, the most profound discoveries are not necessarily beyond that next star. They're within us, woven into the threads that bind us, all of us, to each other.
A final frontier begins in this hall. Let's explore it together.
But hey, if it were easy, it wouldn't need doing, right?
-Andrea Phillips
-Martin Marks
-Rachel C.
-via Jed Hartman
-Nandini Harihareswara (circa 1996)
-Julia Rios
Up until about a hundred years ago, there was one question that burned in every human, that made us study the stars and dream of traveling to them. Are we alone? Our generation is privileged to know the answer to that question. We are all explorers driven to know what's over the horizon, what's beyond our own shores.
Cogito, Ergo Sumana by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sumanah@panix.com.