There are always distractions, if you allow them.
Let's not kid ourselves. Whatever we diagnose, most patients, if they don't die, get well by themselves. Our job is mainly to try to make them feel better; do no harm.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't think you can measure life in terms of years. I think longevity doesn't necessarily have anything to do with happiness. I mean happiness comes from facing challenges and going out on a limb and taking risks. If you're not willing to take a risk for something you really care about, you might as well be dead.
Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that's been our unifying cry, 'More light. ' Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlelight. Neon, incandescent lights that banish the darkness from our caves to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier's Field. Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we're supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor. Light is knowledge, light is life, light is light.
Life is everywhere. The earth is throbbing with it - it's like music. The plants, the creatures, the ones we see, the ones we don't see, it's like one, big, pulsating symphony.
It's no accident that the church and the graveyard stand side by side. The city of the dead sleeps encircled by the city of the living.
I am going to concentrate on what's important in life. I'm going to strive everyday to be a kind and generous and loving person. I'm going to keep death right here, so that anytime I even think about getting angry at you or anybody else, I'll see death and I'll remember.
Day-thoughts feed nightly dreams; And sorrow tracketh wrong, As echo follows song.
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
The ecclesiastical description of Hell is that of a horrible place of fire and torment; in Dante's Inferno, and in northern climes, it was thought to be an icy cold region, a giant refrigerator.
Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.