It's all right here.

If you think
you can do a thing

or

think
you can't do a thing,

You're right.

— Henry Ford

Living life on purpose

In the first song of his valedictory album Brainwashed, George Harrison caught me up short with a line I've since come to realize is an old one, but it was the first time I'd heard it.

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

All of the self-help books I've ever encountered seem to come down to a few basic truths, and that's one of them. Expressed more positively, it's simply: Know where you want to be, set a goal to get there, and act on the goal.

The Earl Nightingale and James Allen pieces I referenced the last couple of days, use agrarian examples to make their point, Nightingale referring to a farmer and Allen to a gardener. Their point: If you want to grow flowers, or corn, you till the land, plant the seed and do what's needed to bring the plant to fruition — weeding, watering, etc. And you'd better plant in the spring if you want the food by the end of the summer.

Their point is that the mind is like the soil, and goals are the seed. You set the goal and do what's needed to bring it to fruition. And you'd better set a deadline if you want to reach the goal. Without a specific timeline, you have no way to know whether knee-high by the Fourth of July is a sign of coming success or of impending failure.

The farmer analogy works well because most people understand how hard farmers work, with a single-minded purpose — grow the corn, keep the cows milked. Setting your mind and going for a goal is not easy. As my friend John Newman reminded me the other day in an e-mail, have you ever tried to think about just one thing for two minutes straight? It's pretty much impossible; your mind has a will of its own and will skip off on a tangent. Keeping eyes on the prize is a simple concept, but not an easy task. If it were easy, everyone would reach the goals they set.

Allen takes it a step further, however, suggesting that everyone does reach the goals they set — and because most people don't set goals, they reap what their minds sow (or failed to sow). "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Allen says:

Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.

And on a subject that recurs frequently here:

The will to do springs from the knowledge that we can do. Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step. He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.

We all face doubt and fear on a daily basis, and manipulative men and women encourage us to be afraid so they we will buy into their self-serving solutions. Refuse to be afraid — that is, refuse to let doubt and fear control you — and you're on the road to freedom.

As I wrote during the last election season, "Freedom is not about having the right ruler. Oh, wait, yes it is. Freedom is understanding that I am the boss of me." You can live a life without doubt and fear weighing you down; you simply have to live it on purpose.

Messages from God

Last summer I wrote:

When you set your mind on a vision that fires up your dreams, it's as if the forces of the universe align to make it happen. Try not to think too hard about why that's true, but understand it is true. Maybe it's simply that people sense your enthusiasm and are drawn to help. Maybe it's that catching the fire of your inner passion generates an energy that makes you do what's necessary. Maybe it's God; yep, that's how I envision it, but if you have issues with the idea of supernatural power, don't dwell on it. The important thing is overcoming the illusion that you might fail.

Last month I wrote:

Refuse To Be Afraid, a book based on the themes of this blog, and The Imaginary Revolution, a novel that embraces the Zero Aggression Principle as its theme, are the creations that will scream "This is what I believe. This is how I try to live my life." As such, I have embued them with too much significance; I have been reluctant to pull them together, for the same primal fear we all share: What if we were to say "This is true and important," and the vast mass of folks out there sniffed at it and said, "No, it's not. You're a lunatic. Worse: You're irrelevant."

Maybe I am. But you know, books that are never published touch no one. So I plow ahead.

Sunday, my pastor preached on the theme "refuse to be afraid." This morning, I find on Sunni's blog a dialogue that contains insights into the themes I'm exploring with The Imaginary Revolution. The conversation spins from a beautiful insight from Bill St. Clair.

The forces of the universe aligning to assist my work and encourage me? Messages from God to help me now that I'm on the right track?

Who cares? I am grateful for the insights and plow ahead.

Beat the fear

When the fear paralyzes you, the important question to ask is "What am I really afraid of?"

In other words, what's the worst-case scenario?

You could fail. You could go broke. You could lose the job, the house, all your stuff. You could die.

Two things you need to realize. First, your worst fears probably won't materialize. Second, even if they do you'll be OK. Well, if you die maybe not. But you probably will not die, at least not from this.

Throttle your fear. Refuse to be afraid and unleash the power of your dreams.

Live the probabilities

"Most things I worry about never happen anyway." — Tom Petty.

You could die from swine flu. But you probably won't.

You might get killed this morning when a drunken idiot runs a red light or cuts you off on the highway. But you'll probably make it home safely tonight.

A terrorist might be on board the plane you're taking today. But probably not.

You might be laid off and replaced by an illegal immigrant. But the chances are almost zero.

In fact, the world might come to an end in 2012. But most of us very likely will live to see 2013 — and those of us who don't won't perish in a planetwide catastrophe.

Every intrusion on our freedom begins with politicians planting the seed of an improbable fear, and then cultivating it until it becomes so irrational a majority is ready to surrender a piece of liberty.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." — H.L. Mencken.

As you peruse your newspaper or Web sites, as you listen to and watch newscasts, be mindful of the percentages. Remember the truth of Petty and Mencken. Refuse to be afraid, refuse to be led to the safety of a cage — in other words, free yourself.

Life is what happens to you ...

Many of us who gather here had a friend named kyfho, who died at the end of April 2008 after a life of thoughtful reflection in the name of liberty. He comes to mind of late as I kick-start projects that I originally intended to complete in time for him to read them.

Kyfho said it's important to have a philosophy of life — perhaps paraphrasing what Shepherd Book says in his exit lines of the brilliant film Serenity: "I don't care what you believe — just believe!" I haven't necessarily completely embraced his urgency — I don't mind a little fuzziness and uncertainty — but his point was, in part, that your life will reflect the principles you believe, so it's probably important to know what those principles are.

Refuse To Be Afraid, a book based on the themes of this blog, and The Imaginary Revolution, a novel that embraces the Zero Aggression Principle as its theme, are the creations that will scream "This is what I believe. This is how I try to live my life." As such, I have embued them with too much significance; I have been reluctant to pull them together, for the same primal fear we all share: What if we were to say "This is true and important," and the vast mass of folks out there sniffed at it and said, "No, it's not. You're a lunatic. Worse: You're irrelevant."

Maybe I am. But you know, books that are never published touch no one. So I plow ahead. I've provided a taste of RTBA in an ebook (go ahead, click over there), but there's much more to say. I've gotten a podcast of the first two chapters of I-Rev done only to turn around and start over, but the arc of the tale is now in my mind and it only needs to be written down. They were going to be ready by Christmas 2008, and now I expect to offer them up in 2010. Two years too late, or right on time.

And wherever kyfho is, I hope he'll somehow enjoy the final products.

The other side of 'Refuse to be Afraid'

I admit it, I laughed.

More of this demotivation at Despair.com. Where else?

Information is freedom

In the opening pages of our eBook Refuse to Be Afraid (Why haven't you downloaded it yet? Just click on the little blue cover and it's yours), we tell the story of a "big cliff" along Lake Champlain and a little boy who went over the edge screaming with fear, only to collapse in laughter at the bottom because he discovered the drop, invisible through thick brush, was only a few feet. He landed, unharmed, on the shore below.

Information is freedom. Fear kept little Warren from simply relaxing his grip on the side of the hill and sliding to safety. He'd have been off that cliff very quickly and avoided several minutes of sheer terror. Of course, he wouldn't have a lesson that has stayed with him for 50 years, either.

Fear of the unknown keeps us paralyzed. It makes little drops seem like huge cliffs. It turns an annoying little speedbump into an unclimbable mountain.

Afraid because you don't know what might happen? Educate yourself. Find out all you can about the path ahead, or the potential obstacles, and they will shrink in your mind — more important, you will discover ways to get around or plow through the obstacles. That's because information is freedom. The truth will ease your fear and set you free.

Still free, eight years later

"They can take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom." - William Wallace, in Braveheart.

You can give away your freedom by acquiescing to draconian security measures and other personal intrusions like those that have been added to our lives over the past eight years. Actually treating everyone as a potential criminal or terrorist was nothing new in the US of A; the events of Sept. 11, 2001, merely provided an excuse to accelerate the process.

I always found it ironic that these anti-liberty measures were enthusiastically implemented by those who, with a straight face, said the attacks were staged "because they hate our freedom." If crushing freedom was the motive, the attackers succeeded to a point.

But your freedom is so hardwired into you that no one can take it from you without taking your life.

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way," Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote, memorably quoted in the opening of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. When everything else is in restraints, you can still think free.

"You can't take the sky from me." - Joss Whedon, "Ballad of Serenity."

Almost ... TOO quiet!

Almost all of the bloggers I regularly check out have been not writing much of late. I almost feel as if everyone agreed to move out and forgot to mention it to me.

Should I join the Facebook crowd and the Twits, and ease out of the blogging bit? Or should I buck the crowd and keep on sharing my odd thoughts with the dozen or so who have stayed with me on the journey? Why is there air anyway?

Perhaps railing against the fear mongers and tyrants has become old and repetitive, and some find it fruitless. I could insert a cliché here, like "it's always darkest just before the dawn," or that nugget about good people failing to act, but I have no magic words to restore hope and freedom.

(Huh. I always thought hope and freedom were the words that went together. I knew "Hope and Change" sounded a little suspicious ...)

Everyday life may have sidetracked a bunch of the folks along that there right rail, but I'll keep coming back with a word or two of encouragement. See ya next time. Oh, and the fear mongers and tyrants? They're just scared little boys and girls who can't handle concepts like liberty that expect people to be responsible grownups. Don't take them so seriously.

The blood of patriots and tyrants

... the people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.

We have had 13 states independant 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion?

& what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them.

what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it's natural manure.

— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Smith, Nov. 13, 1787

I've thought about Jefferson's words a lot lately, as it dawns on more and more liberty lovers that tyranny is taking hold in the land of Jefferson. It's been developing slowly for more than a decade, this bipartisan cloud of tyranny, and pushback seems inevitable.

But I absolutely believe watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants in these times would not be healthy for freedom. Violent revolution against a brutal regime can only result in more violence and more brutality, and a revolution on those terms would require greater brutishness to be victorious, the ultimate "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

No, the revolution must be grounded in the Zero Aggression Principle and the principles of nonviolence espoused by Gandhi and others. Yes, ZAP does not prohibit the use of force; it prohibits the initiation of the use of force. Sufficient force defend one's self is acceptable under ZAP. But I believe forswearing violence is likely the most effective means of ensuring that whatever replaces this brutal regime is itself nonviolent.

Easy for me to say that in the abstract. It would get much harder as the tyrants begin to spill the blood of patriots in greater quantities, especially if it happens to be my blood. But there has to be a difference between the oppressors and the oppressed. When Gandhi's forces of peace allowed themselves to be beaten by British troops, doing nothing more than keep trying to exercise their freedom, they spoke volumes about who were the soldiers of liberty and who were the uncivilized thugs.

I suspect the time is not far off when living free, as most people conceive of liberty, will be illlegal and dangerous. We will need to make some decisions at that time. My choice is to live free in peace.

You are where you are

It's not at all unusual for people to have a sense of dissatisfaction about their circumstances. "I really don't have a peace that I'm where God wants me to be." Or: "This is not where I envisioned being at this stage in my life." Or worse: "I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I know it's not this."

I think the question to ask is: What can you do where you are, while you're there?

A small bit that is good news and bad news: I suspect every life ends with something left unfinished. If you're living life to the fullest, you'll always be doing something until you can't anymore. So if you have a nagging feeling or a firm conviction that your life's mission is something else, don't fret too much about it, just start working on getting to that something (or somewhere) else. And if you're not too sure what your purpose is, well, start thinking (and, if you're so inclined, praying) — with a little self-examination, you'll find that mission, or you may discover you're already doing it.

And for better or for worse, you are where you are now. See what's possible under these circumstances because, for the moment, this is what you have to work with.

What I'm saying is not the old cliché "Bloom where you're planted." You have a huge advantage over a plant: You're mobile. You don't stay planted. You're on a journey. Not only are you not required to stay in one place, that's completely opposite of who and what you are.

To a huge extent the journey is the reward. The downside is if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. OK, those are both clichés, but they're better clichés and more to the point than "Bloom where you're planted."

And even more to the point, you won't make any progress if you spend too much time moping about being at this particular spot on your journey. Much is made in Christian theology about how Jesus worked with people where they were — he mingled with people his society despised, even (gasp!) tax collectors. If he worked miracles with those folks in their circumstances, he can work miracles with you in yours.

You are where you are. What can you accomplish while you're there? And if you're dissatisfied with where you are, what can you do — now — to get where you'd rather be? There's enough time in every day to do what you're doing and work on the things that will get you elsewhere, even if you can only find time for just one tiny step.

If you're sure you want to be somewhere else, taking those steps will make you feel better. And even if you're not sure, taking steps in one direction will help you clarify if it is, indeed, the direction you want to go. Sometimes exploration reveals you actually are where you were "meant" to be. More likely the uneasiness is a signal to get moving.

But you are where you are. This is what you have to work with. "What next?" is a decent question. A better question: What now?

Suggested reading: 48 Days to the Work You Love, Dan Miller; Do It! Let's Get Off Our Buts, Peter McWilliams.

Refuse to Be Afraid: The eBook

As I mentioned the other day, this is more of a Smiley Smile than a Smile, but better that than nothing - for now. Thank you to all who have responded positively when I wrote about these themes.

Click on the cover or this link to download your free 40-page eBook.

Ripples of positive action

These reflections have borne what to my knowledge is the first poem inspired by "Montag ... etc." The eloquent PintofStout left this comment with "Rinse. Repeat.":

I'm not sure if you allow pingbacks or anything, but I thought you'd like to know this post (and the many before it) sprouted a subconscious seed in my brain that has burst forth to life. A poem hath bloomed: Shipwreck (link goes to the intro blog post). Thanks.

Follow the links and you'll find an intriguing little creation about, well, let him explain. I'm tickled to have jarred something loose in PoS's brain — thanks for letting me know!

When a person starts taking positive action, it has a ripple effect. The series of posts that jogged PoS's poetic prowess was a ripple of its own. Not long ago my longtime long-distance pal Wally Conger tossed out a mysterious Facebook entry in which he wrote something to the effect of "That's it! I'm going to get started on some longtime Web business ideas." I recall thinking, "Hmm, I wonder what that's about," and kept my eye out for the results.

A few weeks later Wally sent me a bulk e-mail — from a new e-mail address — announcing his new eBook, Fire-Up Your Cash Flow Over A Donut and Coffee in 10 Minutes — Or Less! It's a quick read packed with thought-starters and ideas and led me to Wally's new Web site. In his site's introduction, "Let's Smash Wage Slavery," he describes the place as "a storehouse for ideas, comments, discussion, and even products targeted to free you from the ugliness of tyrannical work structures."

Positive action yields positive action: I resolved to write. And not just write, but to jump in the way Ray Bradbury put it in his wonderfully inspirational book Zen in the Art of Writing:

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.

After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Now, it's your turn. Jump!

So, every morning since July 20, I've been stepping on a landmine every morning. And I've been reading, too. Wally's eBook led me to other eBooks and free stuff out there in the ether. The concept of the free eBook especially caught my attention: It looks fun and and easy to produce, and I've learned a lot from a handful of the eBooks I've found. Some are original like Wally's, and some are repackages of interesting public-domain stuff.

Sunday, I noticed how those first two weeks of writing kind of flowed together thematically. Just for fun I tossed them together into an eBook — you may have already noticed the link to Preserve the Embers; Stoke the Fire sitting up there in the upper righthand corner of this page.

And it was fun, too — so much fun that by the end of the week you should start seeing more eBooks in that corner. One is a convenient edition of Tom Paine's Letters to the Citizens of the United States, which I've written about these three times of late. I figure you might want to see what got me so excited.

And another is a scaled-down eBook version of Refuse to be Afraid, the book-book I announced with some fanfare before getting sunk by the dread quotidian. Think of it, for now, as my Smiley Smile, the bits of a big project that got bogged down, a glimpse at what may eventually emerge later.

The eBooks are free; you can print them out (as I do, old-fashioned tree-killer that I am) or read them on screen. And I'm also converting them into print-on-demand mini-books. It feels counter-intuitive that people would spend money for a physical version of something they can have for free, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. And it gives me a chance to remind folks of the other Richardson & Bluhm products that are out there.

Reactions like PintofStout's (and Sunni's shout-out a few days earlier) are evidence of the ripple effect and momentum that positive action produces. Now, I wonder what it was that inspired Wally to get off the dime and launch his venture? What splash caused the ripple that is Fire Up Your Cash Flow?

Rinse. Repeat.

Refuse to be afraid. Free yourself. Dream.

Rinse. Repeat.

I've found the little three-step exhortation at the top of this page has multiple applications. Longtime readers know that I started saying "Refuse to be afraid" because so much of modern communication seems to be about raising fears. Terrorists are lurking in every dark corner of the land, most of the food you eat may give you cancer or make you obese or both, and termites may eat the foundation of your house unless you treat it with a certain product.

My advice was simply not to fall for it. Refuse to be afraid. OK, you're nervous and/or scared, but don't let it control you. Refuse to be controlled by your fear.

Then I realized not being afraid was only the first step. You're not afraid, fine. Now what? "Free yourself." Get loose of what you were afraid of. Resist the solutions offered by the politicians and the salesmen and create your own answers. Fly.

But free yourself to do what? Fly where? That's where the dreaming starts.

Releasing the fear makes you free — free to dream — dream of doing something amazing.

How do you apply this advice? It depends on what you're afraid of, or what someone else is trying to frighten you with. But it seems to me the process is the same in most cases. Refuse to be afraid. Now that your fear is under control, you can free yourself to consider many options or take the action you feared. Once free, you can set goals, objectives, dreams ... and go for it! (Whatever "It" may be.)

And then move on to the next fear ... rinse, repeat.

But you are free after all

There are a few ways to react when you read suggestions like "The Dark Years Are Here," which predicts: "Starting in the next 6 months and culminating in 2011-12 the world will experience a series of tumultuous events which will be life changing for most people in the world. But 2011-12 will not be the beginning of an upturn in the world economy but instead the start of a long period of economic, political and social upheaval that could last for a couple of decades."

And it would be easy to fall into dismay when you find a historical review that says, essentially, that if the words of the Declaration of Independence light a fire in your heart, the flame was extinguished when the Articles of Confederation were abandoned in 1789: "The assertion that Americans gained their freedom through the War for Independence (War for Sovereignty) is a myth, one that is highly useful to the federal State. The assertion that Americans have remained free is one of the bigger frauds in history."

The main things to avoid are discouragement and fear. As George Herbert eloquently put it when he wrote his Dune books, "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." And if we are indeed at the beginning of a long period of upheaval, if we have indeed bought into an illusion of freedom, the first thing we need is our wits about us going forward.

Herbert's Bene Gesserit chanted a litany against fear, of which the quote above is part:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

It's a sound process for cleansing the mind of fear's effects. Of course the future is scary; the unknown always is. But get your mind clear in this moment, and ideas about how to prepare will present themselves.

The rulers of this country have not been especially interested in maintaining citizens' political freedom — certainly not in recent years, by some accounts not for a couple of centuries and by this account not ever. And yet hearts and souls continue to jump at the idea of freedom, and millions of people have come to these shores over the years in pursuit of the relative political freedom afforded here.

I use the qualifier "political" freedom above, because the Declaration was correct: We each were born free. Free will and expression are the default settings of the human soul. Governments may be formed with an idealistic goal to "secure" those freedoms, but what governments do best is inhibit and crush free spirits.

But no government can change your mind. No government can make you afraid without your permission. Yes, a government has few qualms about interfering with your life, your liberty and your peaceful pursuit of happiness.

But you are free.

Dream: You cannot fail

"Self-help" is an entire category of book; an industry has grown around materials that give people advice about how to live a more successful life. I think the reason more people don't find success is that they spend more time studying the principles than putting the principles into action.

One question I find frequently in such materials is: What would you do today, right here and right now, if you knew you could not fail? A corollary of the question: What would you do today, right here and right now, if money was no object?

The point of posing these questions is to remove obstacles to your thinking process. Too often creativity is held back by fear of failure or by the perception that a great deal of money is required to launch whatever endeavor you may be considering.

Therefore it's a liberating and exciting exercise to set your mind free by imagining you can't fail and/or that you can afford everything you need to succeed. But one more step is necessary to pop your dream over the top and into reality.

Imagine this: You're not imagining things.

You cannot fail. Money is no object.

I need you to ponder that carefully, I need that to sink in, so I'm going to repeat it.

You cannot fail. Money is no object.

When you set your mind on a vision that fires up your dreams, it's as if the forces of the universe align to make it happen. Try not to think too hard about why that's true, but understand it is true. Maybe it's simply that people sense your enthusiasm and are drawn to help. Maybe it's that catching the fire of your inner passion generates an energy that makes you do what's necessary. Maybe it's God; yep, that's how I envision it, but if you have issues with the idea of supernatural power, don't dwell on it. The important thing is overcoming the illusion that you might fail.

Just know that dreams are contagious. When you set your mind on a vision that fires up your dreams, something makes it begin to happen. Understanding that you cannot fail ignites the dreams.

Most people — if they even bother to go through the exercise and answer a question like "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" — feel a burst of creative energy, get in touch with their dreams and inner passion, and then step back and think, "Well, that was an interesting exercise. Too bad for all the reasons why I can't do that stuff."

The people who succeed find a way to stay in touch with that inner passion. They discover that it wasn't just a mental exercise.

What would you do today, right now and right here, if you knew you could not fail? Hang onto that thought, because here comes the kicker: It's true. You cannot fail. So you may as well get started.

Gojira and the cuddly monster factor

From time to time I wonder about the process that converted Godzilla into a series of movies that appeal mostly to children.

The 1954 Japanese film Gojira is a remarkable drama. Nine years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a creature emerges from the depths of the seas, shaken loose by the vibrations of nuclear bomb testing and mutated to unnatural proportions by the bombs' radiation.

A scientist has created a weapon even more terrible than an atomic bomb, one so horrible that he refuses to share the process he used to discover the technology and resists efforts to use the weapon against the giant creature, even as Japan's largest city comes under siege.

It's a movie about war, peace, violence and nonviolence, technology and the simple ongoing question: Just because something can be done, is it right and just to do it? A very thoughtful and important movie with fantasy and science fiction elements.

Gojira was repackaged as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, for distribution in America, and each and every one of its more than 20 sequels has been mindless child's play. One almost has to wonder: What was so dangerous about the ideas in Gojira that it had to be so trivialized?

But then — scary monsters are often transformed into cuddly children's toys. Look at the stark and poignant story of the man built from parts of other men by Dr. Frankenstein. The iconic image of Boris Karloff in his monster makeup eventually became Herman Munster.

Perhaps it's simply a natural reaction to looking into the depths of the soul and finding darkness. We step away, we dress up the darkness with childlike innocence, and we look the other way. A person can only spend so much in the dark before needing a little sunshine.

Conspiracy to suppress dangerous ideas didn't turn Gojira into Godzilla. We just need to be reassured that things that go bump in the night are just bumps.

Life is either ...

“Security is mostly a superstition.

"It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Helen Keller

"It is one of the great jokes of existence. When people take the courage to journey into the center of their fear, they find — nothing. It was only many layers of fear, being afraid of itself."

— Peter McWilliams