What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Annie DillardRead
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the choices between service, creativity, and devotion, highlighting the emotional toll of hard work and spiritual engagement.
In this quote, Annie Dillard explores the dual paths of serving others and expressing oneself through art, such as singing. She points out that both paths involve deep emotional investment and hard work, suggesting that whether we choose to serve through labor or through creative expression, we are engaging in a form of prayer or devotion that can lead to personal fulfillment but also emotional challenges.
In practice
This quote can be used during a motivational speech about finding passion in work and creativity.
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.
To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.
Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides.
What you think about yourself is much more important than what others think of you.
Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.
Hindsight is notably cleverer than foresight.
When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. . . . The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one's whole being, is that you alone control nothing. . . .
There is always room for a man of force and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers and the best heads among them take the best places.
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