“If you spend your time hoping that it doesn’t rain tomorrow, you are wasting your time. Your thoughts don’t change the rain. You will someday come to see that there is no use for that incessant internal chatter, and there is no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. ”
"Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student
gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for
a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best
thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball."
It is these antimuscarinic properties that mean patients with glaucoma and prostate enlargement should ideally avoid their use, because it could lead to increased intraocular pressure and precipitation of urinary retention.
“Does that word mean nothing to you?” I say.
“What word?” asks Kat.
“Love,” I say. “You use it a lot.”
“I have infinite love to give,” Kat says to the sky.
“Right,” I say to my shoes.
Maybe people just use different things to fill up the emptiness. Until it becomes less about feeling empty and more about feeding something else.
A limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go an thou will go, and it will never return.
