Ed Dowding

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Edward Abbey via Andrew Simm’s Lady Eve Lecture

Considerably better lyrics than I had ever expected from Take That:

Just the other day somebody
Said to me, hey maybe you’re slightly schizophrenic
And a little out of reach my friend.
I said, yes that?s partly true,
But jokes aside, I can explain,
It?s just my way of keep in track with
Living on this planet now, then
Have you turned on your TV?
Have you seen reality?
Have you found the program, that you spend your whole life looking for?
There’s a girl in Camden Town,
And decision makes her frown.
Which dress would she wear today and which way should she smile at me?

How did it come to this?
How did it ever come to this?

All this noise and all this lies,
All this talking through the nights,
All this expectation now,
It’s making me neurotic, tell me
Have I seen your face before?
Have forgot to say hello!
Though I’d made it clear now,
That I’ve always been a smiler, tell me

How did it come to this?
How did it ever come to this?

Just the other day somebody
Said to me, hey maybe you’re also slightly
OCD, a little out of reach my friend.
I said, yes that?s partly true,
But jokes aside, please stay with me,
It’s just my way of compartmentalising
All the things I see

How did it come to this?
How did it ever come to this?

Mottainai  is a Japanese term meaning “a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilized.”

The expression “Mottainai!” can be uttered alone as an exclamation when something useful, such as food or time, is wasted.

In addition to its primary sense of “wasteful,” the word is also used to mean “impious; irreverent” or “more than one deserves.”

Source: Wikipedia

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.”

Doulas Adams, The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy

The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.

Ellen Glasgow

PS. You’re going to die one day, soon. Bummer, eh?