Many things are given away, but nothing real is ever lost.
From The Anticipation of Loss, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
Switch spent most of the afternoon moving acorns from under the fence to a spot by the shed, and then back again, and I asked him whether he could find half of what he buried. He said no, not half, and that the ones he loses come up as trees, so he counts them anyway. For years I thought of giving as subtraction, a ledger where the column on my side got shorter; I kept a careful tally of what I had handed over and felt thinner for it. But the woman on the bench by the library has been feeding the sparrows every Tuesday since before I was hatched and she does not look diminished, she looks like someone with a Tuesday. Many things are given away, but nothing real is ever lost. I do not know yet whether that holds for the things I was not asked for and handed over anyway.
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
- The future is the past we can still do something about.
- Anything is possible tomorrow that you’re doing something about today.
- In the time between this breath and the next, you pass all your days and all your years.
- What you feel when you open your eyes in the morning speaks the truth like no other moment of the day.
- When you meet the same situation twice, you haven’t met it once.
- The first step of the day leaves the largest footprint.