1. God
2. Sunsets
3. Subdividing the task
4. Neither all or nothing – sometimes
5. Walking around and talking
6. Hats
7. Smells of herbs through the window
8. Yellow finches landing on sunflowers too
9. Steve P on negative thinking and acting – like a warning light on my car’s dashboard that I need to pay attention to, which reminds me why listening to him is a good thing
“Mrs. Whiting remained undaunted for the simple reason that she never, ever allowed herself to dwell on the magnitude of whatever she was confronted with … Each day Mrs. Whiting had a “To Do” list, and the brilliance of that list lay in the fact that she was careful never to include anything undoable. On those rare occasions when a task proved more complicated or difficult than she’d imagined, she simply subdivided it. In this fashion, the woman never encountered anything but success…She might be delayed, but never deterred.
“Her daughter, on the other hand, was forever being deterred. Temperamentally unable to master her mother’s simple trick, Cindy Whiting immediately envisioned the entirety of what lay before her and was thus in one deft stroke overwhelmed and defeated by it. She wasn’t so much a dreamer … as a believer, and what she believed in, or wished to, was the possibility of complete transformation. At some point in her young life she’d come to believe that the whole world, the totality of her circumstance, would have to change if change was to do her any good. … After all, her whole world had undergone a complete transformation …as a little girl … [,] … an event that had taught her how quickly everything could change, and that the stroke accomplishing such danger is swift, powerful and beyond human comprehension. She was simply waiting for it to happen again.” Richard Russo, Empire Falls