Fruitful choices

Every day I have the opportunity to choose how I am going to live—this is a great privilege but also a great responsibility. The way of our dreams–the Alpine Path, if you will–is not a leisurely stroll in a shaded wood, or even a pleasant hike up a rolling grade. It is a daily battle. A limiting unto more freedom. A devotion and a discipline, and it will sometimes require a shedding or a pruning or a sundering. It means that I cannot be choice-less in the matter because every day’s fruit is only a result of the choices I have made all along the way, from the time I get up till the time I go to bed.

~Lanier of Lanier's Books in a post about Tasha Tudor.

Mediocrity trumps pride

Once again, Carol at Magistra Mater posted some quotes that got my attention and led me to borrow the book from the library. I found another, must-copy-down quote. This one is from Katherine Paterson, a writer of children's books (that I've never read) and a missionary kid (China).

When a professor suggested Mrs. Paterson consider becoming a writer, she brushed off the suggestion thinking that she

wouldn't want to add another mediocre writer to this world. Being a glorious failure didn't scare me at all, but being just mediocre did.

What I heard [the professor] say was, If you're not willing to be mediocre, you'll never be anything at all. I think that's a very important lesson to learn, because people always want a guarantee that they're going to be wonderful. But there's no way of knowing you're good, if you don't dare to be mediocre.

The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists, edited by Diane Olsen, p. 159.

Never quitting

This applies to so many aspects of life:

One of the biggest challenges in this or any age is to stick with the necessary changes we need to make and hold fast to the end. As important as beginnings are, the real test is in reaching the finish line, which requires perseverance for the long haul. Because we tend to turn things over to others--experts--we lose the opportunity to develop true self-sufficiency. [...] Going forward, we have to be willing to get past the idea stage and individually sweat the details, adjusting to unforeseen difficulties, and, above all, never quitting.

Jules Dervaes

Why I am here

As quoted on Magistra Mater:

[After opinion is asked--and received--about their orders, a subordinate asks Major Whittlesey]

"Why are you here?"

"Life would be a lot simpler if we could choose our duties and obligations. But we can't. We shouldn't. That's why I am here."

~ Major Charles Whittlesey in the DVD Lost Battalion

The ever-improving path

Sometimes the coincidence of conversations and seemingly random Web or book browsing is just too, well, coincidental. A quote from A Circle of Quiet:

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path... But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

*Winston Churchill*

"Ever-improving"—either the path itself or the effects of the path on the person climbing it.

Approved Unto God

"Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." 2 Timothy 2:15

If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the days of his life. Struggle to re-express some truth of God to yourself, and God will use that expression to someone else. Go through the winepress of God where the grapes are crushed. You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else; but if you say lazily - "I am not going to struggle to express this thing for myself, I will borrow what I say," the expression will not only be of no use to you, but of no use to anyone. Try to state to yourself what you feel implicitly to be God's truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, December 15.

Life's point of no return

From my offline journal, dated June 30, 2002, two quotes from Markings, by Dag Hammarskjöld:

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return (p. 66).

Dare [she], for whom circumstances make it possible to realize [her] true destiny, refuse it simply because [she] is not prepared to give up everything else? (p. 67)

Passion

If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility?

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, as quoted in The Art of Possibility, page 113.