belligerentyouth>>>
People spending all their time thinking about how everyone is dying, should just live.
Amen, I say, but judging from the proliferation of self-help books on this subject, and the size of the bank accounts of their authors, I assume many find it hard to do so.
which brings to mind Pascal's observation, which I quote here:
"We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end.
Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so."
Pascal was born in 1623 and died after a long illness in 1662.
