Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

“Why can’t people see the good things in front of them?”

“They think they have time for it later.”

List (2011) (via CinemaBravo)

21 thoughts on “Monday Morning Wake-Up Call”

  1. Because, we often, set our sights, too far ahead, in the futures, that we miss, what’s in the, now, as we thought, we still fave, countless number of, tomorrows, that are, endowed to, us.

    1. It is like what we have done to chickens. Forced growth under optimum conditions, so that in eight weeks they are ready for the mechanical picker. The most forlorn and comical statements are the ones made by the grateful young who say now I can be ready in two years and nine months to go out in and earn a living rather than wasting 4 years in college. Education is something that should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefore. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? Today the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no one around with any interest in answering the question, so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school concept. A devoted technician is seldom an educated man. He can be a useful man, a contented man, a busy man. But he has no more sense of the mystery and wonder and paradox of existence than does one of those chickens fattening itself for the mechanical plucking, freezing and packaging.

      — John D. MacDonald, A Purple Place for Dying: A Travis McGee Novel (Random House, February 12, 2013) (via The Hammock Papers)

      1. Oh yes. In the hospital I told my mom I’d come back to see her on Wednesday and she died on Tuesday. That was 40 years ago, but I always regretted that I had put off that visit. And of course we do that with so many things, thinking we have all the time in the world. Reality check!

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