Advice from well-traveled eyes

If you find what you don't like in the world, you are only halfway to knowing what you like. When you know what you like, you must reach past what you don't like to pull what you do like into reality, and in the process, your elbows will knock aside what you dislike. Without a goal of creation and acquisition we lapse into negativity, excessive literalism, bitterness, impotence -- and most importantly: we do not accomplish our goals.

Reach toward what is desired; open the mind; never forget what you do desire because everything that is not-that is what you dislike, and if you try to focus on what you dislike, you will be cutting hydra heads and never reach victory.

ANUS

Writers -- the real kind, which I'd like to be someday -- walk a hard path because they must find the eternal in the mundane, and bring it back to you so you can desire to find the eternal in yourself. They do that because only then will you understand the moral vigilance which life requires if you don't want your species to fall back down the evolutionary staircase. Writers, or at least the ones I've known, recognize more than anyone else that every significant experience is a hard-fought victory that left scars, and if we read them, we have knowledge.