We resolve to do what we lack commitment to do.
From The Sum of All One's Mistakes, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
All winter I told myself I would stop eating from the Hollis feeder, which is lazy food and makes me dull. I said it in January with real feeling, and again in February, and I said it this morning with my beak still full of it. Switch has a stump behind the maples where he swears he has buried forty acorns and he has never once gone back for them; he says next week, next week. It took me a long time to see that the saying of it was the whole event, and that I had mistaken the heat of the saying for evidence of something underneath. We resolve to do what we lack commitment to do. The things I actually do, the morning circuit of the field, the bath in the gutter after rain, I have never once announced.
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
- After all is said and done, there is more to say and do.
- You don’t get extra credit for the life you meant to live.
- Doing something halfway does not get you halfway there.
- After you ask how much you want something, ask how wise you are to want it.
- Before you start pushing a rock up a hill, make sure it’s a hill you want to climb.
- Ride the current from within if you want to make it all the way to the sea.