Prescience is sometimes mistaken for resignation.

Click to enlarge: A bear eating a fish.

Those who work hard and succeed tend to think everyone who hasn't succeeded has failed because they haven't worked as hard.

This is a cultural axiom so ingrained you can't discuss your way around it. Disputing its logic would be like saying you didn't vote but still want to complain about who gets elected.[1]

Salmon struggle upstream to spawn or die trying, perhaps plucked up by a hungry bear. Less than 10% of tadpoles survive to become adult frogs. Most cows end up at the butcher (and even a fifth of dairy cows are turned into hamburger after their utters give out).[2]

We each have our role, our moment, our purpose, if we've been fortunate to find it, and prescient enough to embrace it.

[2013-03-10]

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Say something else in that ear.

"Prescience is sometimes mistaken for resignation. They are not the same thing."

--Clarence 0ddbody

 

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Overheard:
"We prayed like hell"
--Oklahoma tornado survivor on 5/21/2013.

[2013-05-21]

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[1]
Which of course you're welcome to do, but no one will listen to you.

[2]
My Uncle Ken, who was a missionary in the 60's in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, told of us a bug that lives underground and periodically matures and flies up into the air, where it dies and falls to the earth. Children sit over the holes these insects crawl out of, and as they take flight, the children pull the wings off and catch them in their mouths like popcorn. Uncle Ken said they taste like Hersey's kisses.

True story.

Carolee, his eldest child, came back to the United States fluent in Lingala. (She was very little and doesn't speak it anymore.) Their other children Tom Tom and Dee Dee also spent time in the Congo with Uncle Ken and Aunt Dorothy, and I think Tom Tom was actually born there.

Lingala is a Bantu language spoken throughout the Congo.

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