Joyful Dislikes

“Citizens hate living there, and if they have to move away on business or adventure—or more usually until some statute of limitations runs out—can’t wait to get back so they can enjoy hating living there some more”

~ Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett

People can be weird like that. Sometimes, we enjoy disliking something just as much as we enjoy liking something.

When you get down to it, people seem to really love complaining.

While I wouldn’t necessarily say that that’s a completely terrible thing, I do wonder if perhaps it can lead to some unhealthy behavior, unfortunate beliefs, or ill consequences. After all, words do have quite a bit of influence over us, no matter how jokingly we say them. Who knows? If we say something enough times, maybe it’ll become true. And you never know when an insult or a complaint said in jest might be taken as truth and cause real damage.

Again, this quote was written down while I was listening to the audiobook, so I apologize if the formatting is not exactly the same as it appears in the printed book.

Simple Days

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

~ Confucius 

We do seem very good at that, certainly.

I always hear people say that your college years are the best years of your life, and I remember thinking, “No way.” I mean, if college really is a person’s best years, what does that mean for our futures? What kind of years could we look forward to after that? Sure, entering the “real world” means people have to take things more seriously, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be great years, that we can’t have fun or set about creating great memories. I listened to the grownups talk about those “best years” and I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let my life get less interesting after college graduation.

Well, now I’ve been a college graduate for almost two years, and I think I understand better now why my parents and everyone else used to say that about college. It’s not that you don’t have fun after you graduate. College comprises some of the best years of our lives because, while we’re in college, we know exactly where we stand in the world. We know what we’re supposed to be doing, what our goals are in the near future, and how we have to work in order to achieve those goals. Life is simple when your position is so straightforward and organized.

So maybe college doesn’t have to be the best years of your life, but you should certainly enjoy them while you can. That kind of simplicity can be so rare in our lives these days.

Thinking along these lines, I suppose that one way to make life more simple is to figure out just where it is we belong, who it is we are or want to be, and set a clear plan for how to proceed. Of course, such things are always easier said than done. It’s just not that easy to stamp out all the doubts that make life so complicated.