If you want to get over a mountain, some of the time you will have to go uphill.
From Life Is Difficult, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
Switch took me the long way around the hill this morning because the long way has walnuts on it, and we got to the ridge an hour after the sun did. For years I thought the clever thing was the circling: find the updraft, ride the warm air off the road, let the mountain do the lifting. Today there was no warm air, only gray, and I flapped the whole last stretch with my chest burning and nothing underneath me worth the name of wind. If you want to get over a mountain, some of the time you will have to go uphill. Switch, who has no wings and never has, was already at the top eating, and he had not thought about any of this. I have been calling the flapping a failure of technique for most of my life.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- How can you take life in stride when every bother bothers you?
- More protest when their feet go numb than when their mind does.
- The sea in the day and the stars in the night remind me how small I am and smaller still my troubles.
- If you can't take one more thing, get ready for two.
- Many people have hit bottom and kept falling.
- Saying I can't doesn't mean it won't.