“It happens to everyone"

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Crisis management is never part of the acting curriculum. That’s too bad. Rolling with the punches is key to success in this business. It’s not whether you can cry on cue. It’s whether you can cry on cue, in a windstorm, while drinking a fake beer out of a dirty glass.
How do you do that? I’m not really sure. Grab onto the story like it’s the mane of a runaway horse? That helps sometimes. The one thing I do know: It happens to everyone. It’s not just you. Recently, I have tried a mental adjustment that seems to work: Don’t look at calamities as a wall between you and your work. Think of them as little surprises life is giving you to keep it fresh.

                  ~ Stephen Tobolowsky

In his post, Mr. Tobolowsky was talking about acting, but it's a good attitude for living your life.

Hold every hour in your grasp

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Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today's task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow's. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity—time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

                  ~ Seneca, Volume IV, Epistles 1-65 via Letters of Note
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It was a story that took on the moral power of what heroism is and what it is not. In a post-Davy Crockett universe we have hungered for meaning. In the void, we will hang our affections almost anywhere. The {undeserved} of our world are trumpeted on the front pages of our papers and on television-while the {deserved} of our age toil, strive, live, and die unnoticed.

                  ~ Stephen Tobolowsky. The Dangerous Animals Club
in

I'm more detached from the result than I have ever been in my career.

He played the smartest way he could, working as hard as he knew to work. If that ended in a loss … well, life's like that sometimes. But it's no reason to go changing everything.

It's exactly not how most of us think about sports. But maybe it is, in fact, exactly the lesson we should all take from the best teams in the NBA and into our daily lives. Do things the right way, even when that gets you bad results.

                  ~ Shane Battier (first quote); Henry Abbott. ESPN article: Durant, Thunder still right on time

This is the same article that my Scott Brook's quote from yesterday was from, just a fantastic article about doing the work. That Shane Battier quote shows a commitment to doing things the right way that most people cannot commit to, but if you can, I'm going to say that whether the results are good or bad, as a person, you will sleep better at night and be happier.

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The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment...
The more obvious reason why confronting the present produces anxiety is that it raises the question of decisions and responsibility...
The most effective way to ensure the value of the future is to confront the present courageously and constructively.

                  ~ Rollo May. Man's Search for Himself

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We are living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born...A choice confronts us. Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic? Frightened by the loss of our familiar mooring places, shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy? If we do those things, we will have surrendered our chance to participate in the forming of the future. We will have forfeited the distinctive characteristic of human beings.

                  ~ Rollo May. The Courage to Create

On Winter in the Midwest

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'This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.' It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.

                  ~ Willa Cather. My Antonia

I feel like this every winter...

in

The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

                  ~ Willa Cather. My Antonia

Really enjoying this. It's not a page-turner, but Cather can really paint a portrait of a scene.