Wednesday, December 12, 2018

day no. 14,660: such a sweet trap

My wife sent me the following quotes from "Travels With Charley In Search of America" - John Steinbeck

"It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany.  It had happened to so many of my friends.  The lecture ends, "Slow down. You're not as young as you once were." And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism.  In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap."

"Who doesn't like to be a center for concern?  A kind of second childhood falls on so many men.  They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span.   In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror.  For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness.  I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.  I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.  My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby... And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity.  If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway.  I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage.  It's bad theater as well as bad living.  I am very fortunate in having a wife who likes being a woman, which means she likes men, not elderly babies."

Judges 8:21
As the man is, so is his strength

Philippians 3:12-14

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

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