A Saturday morning thought...

The effect of books, like that of some kinds of vaccines, wears off over time. In most cases this is a benign phenomenon, with something of an upside and a downside.

The upside is the ability to read books read long ago as if they were new to you (for me, Agatha Christie's novels come to mind here); the downside involves losing whatever it was that affected your life, oh, so long ago.

For me, Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, falls into the second category. I am rereading the 1984 edition of the book, and found the following gem:

Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

I will be thinking about this throughout the day, as I do some translation and a lot of cleaning! But for the moment, it's time for another cup of coffee!

Cheers...

Department of Headless Chickens

Today was one of those days when the dog and the cats conspired to hie my butt out of the sack at exactly 5 am, as if they could tell time. Shiloh would probably have let me do the slug-a-bed routine, but the cats were having none of it.

Having work to do and a house to clean requires an ability to finely balance one's priorities if both objectives are to be achieved well. Unfortunately, during the course of the day, I kept worrying about "the other thing" no matter what I was doing, which was not awfully conducive to an efficient work flow.

In the end, of the 8019 words in the document, I have translated or edited all but 4700 or so, and an eyeball estimate suggests that most of that remainder is editing. So I think it's time to "extinguish the translation light," if I may be allowed to borrow terminology from The Corps.

At the other end of the world, most of the kitchen is done, I've gathered and done a load of laundry, and I've got dinner in the slow-cooker. I need to finish the kitchen and then abuse the heck out of the vacuum cleaner (by using it).

Galina was somewhere around Española, New Mexico, about 40 minutes ago. I need to get cracking.

Cheers...