Breaking Away from Convention

I was a teacher. Once a teacher, always a teacher. It is impossible to not want to enlighten people once you've developed a taste for it. I spend a great deal of time thinking, and when I'm not thinking, I'm talking. Talking clarifies my thoughts, but so does putting emphasis on reflection.

So much wisdom to impart. So, I documented here on this blog my health scares that resulted in my attention to every moment of every day. Nothing is guaranteed, and I am now on my 3rd major health scare, and, even if it doesn't actually get easier to deal with fear and pain, it is my fear and pain and I am feeling something. That's life. It can be sublimely ecstatic or dreadfully painful, but it's an experience! Feel the wonderful life that is within you; let nothing be lost upon you - Oscar Wilde

I look to the greats for bits and pieces of my philosophy. I also look to travel to broaden my mind and see things in a way I never would have expected. I cannot plan travel for quite some time due to my health issues, but I can still read the greats, who did travel. Here's some of their unattributed wisdom:

• The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.
• And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
• It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
• He might be ragged and cold or even starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.
• Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
• Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

This is one of my favorite books, by a famous author, but I bet you can't guess the author. No cheating.

Right now, my convalescence that was a gift from my sister and father is coming to a close. I need to get back to the grind and yesterday, sick or not. I have used this time, amongst other things, to travel back in my mind. It has been one of the best trips I have ever taken. I have an old friend to thank for that: a very, very patient friend who may not have pure intentions but neither do I. I am very lucky. Even not feeling well, I am enjoying myself. And, hey! if this great author can be cold, ragged and starving and yet broad and free, I can do it warm, ragged, and starting to finally fill up.