A Quote Nearly Guaranteed to Surprise You and Make You Think

I've been doing some housecleaning the last few days. By housecleaning, I mean organizing the files on my Mac, as well as some of the content on my blog. It was while doing the latter that I came across the following quote last night:

"The world is too big for us, too much is going on, too many crimes, too much violence and excitement. Try as you will, you get behind in the race in spite of yourself. It's a constant strain to keep pace... and still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen rapidly, you're out of breath trying to keep pace with who's in and who's out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature can't endure much more."

Can you believe it? That was published 135 years ago on this day in the Atlantic Journal, June 16, 1883. I hear Twilight Zone music.

* * * *
When I first started blogging it was out of a desire to learn what blogging was. There were very few rules so it was like feeling my way along in the dark. A lot of those early blog posts began with . excerpts from my 30 years of journalling. Usually I would copy the journal segment and then expound on it, but on a few occasions I simply shared something from my journal as I did on June 22. This was my shortest ever blog post.

Observation from William E. Simon's A Time For Truth. He compares freedom to air. It's something you take for granted until you're without it. 
Sept 4, 1985

* * * *
Today is Grandma's Marathon here in the Northland. For the moment it appears that the storms our weather folk predicted are being graciously held at bay, most likely due to the Lake Effect which makes nearly all weather here unpredictable.

The Marathon easily triggers images of runners, and when I think of runners this verse from Ecclesiastes often comes to mind: "I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all." --Eccles. 9:11

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Embrace it.