An advertisement-free blog about motorcycling, Northern life, home improvement, power plants, submarines, nuclear stuff, and a few other off-beat subjects. Comments are welcome. (Image is the Selway Crags in Northern Idaho)
"Frighened of change? But what can exist without it? What is closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can an vital process take place without something being changed?
"Can't you see? It's just the same with you - and just as vital to nature." - Marcus Aurelius
"It is always our choice whether or not we wish to pay the price for life's rewards. And often it is best for us not to pay the price, for the price might be our integrity." - Epictetus
Below is a pretty typical internet speed test result where I live. I'm in a rural place that has no cable service and no fiber available. The service is DSL, and the phone/internet company has shown no interest at all in improving the quality of their service. I've called plenty of times.
"Do not try to seem wise to others." - Epictetus
This post is a follow-up to the previous "Subaru Stinks" post.
"When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrance to the harmony will increase your mastery of it." - Marcus Aurelius
"Don't look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different. So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us.
Now you anticipate the child's emergence from its mother's womb; that's how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment. Or perhaps you need some tidy aphorism to tuck away in the back of your mind. Well, consider two things that should reconcile you to death: the nature of the things you'll leave behind you, and the kind of people you'll no longer be mixed up with.
There's no need to feel resentment toward them-in fact, you should look out for their well-being, and be gentle with them-but keep in mind that everything you believe is meaningless to those you leave behind. Because that's all that could restrain us (if anything could)-the only thing that could make us want to stay here: the chance to live with those who share our vision. But now? Look how tiring it is-this cacophony we live in. Enough to make you say to death, "Come quickly. Before I start to forget myself, like them." - Marcus Aurelius
"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are." - Marcus Aurelius
"All cruelty springs from weakness." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca
I pulled the old bike down off the mezzanine recently, and ordered a bunch of parts (box, bottom right). It sat there with flat tires and a thick layer of dust until I had a couple of days to get around to refurbishing it.
"There is a time and place for diversion and amusements, but you should never allow them to override your true purpose." - Epictetus
Below: A Ponderosa pine tree fell across a street in Coeur d'Alene, ID as a result of the wind storm on January 13, 2021
"We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them." - Epictetus
"Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents." - Epictetus
Cycling has been on my mind a lot recently. I mostly blame the shipmate who sent that old photo, below:
"Take full account of what excellencies you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not." - Marcus Aurelius
"Whenever anyone criticizes or wrongs you, remember that they are only doing or saying what they think is true. They cannot be guided by your views, only their own so if their views are wrong, they are the ones who suffer insofar as they are misguided." - Epictetus
"Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look." - Marcus Aurelius
