Transformation Tuesday Quotes

Our boys are failing in school. Has it occurred to no one that we have checked them at every turn, perversely insisting that they must not form brotherhoods, that they must not identify their manhood with practical and intellectual skills that transform the world, and that they must not ever have the opportunity, apart from girls, to attach themselves in friendship to men who could teach them? For good reason boys of that awkward age used to build tree houses and hang signs barring girls. They knew, if only instinctively, that the fire of the friendship could not subsist otherwise. But what similar thing can they do now without inviting either reproach or suspicion? Thus what is perfectly natural and healthy, indeed very much needed for certain people at certain times or for certain purposes, is cast as irrational and bigoted, or dubious and weak; and thus some boys will cobble together their own brotherhoods that eschew tenderness altogether, criminal brotherhoods that land them in prison. This is all right by us, it seems. Better to harass the Boy Scouts on Monday, and on Tuesday build another wing for the Ministry of Corrections.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been travelling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. There are moments—rarely—when you make a landmark, you realize that you’re going with a woman, in some messy business. The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926. That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. [...] “I was out walking, I had left the town without realizing it, I was thinking about my money troubles.” This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions. And the story goes on in the reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves in a lighthearted way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and each one of them in turn, draws out the preceding instant: “It was night, the street was deserted.” The phrase is cast out negligently, it seems superfluous; but we do not let ourselves be caught and we put it aside: this is a piece of information whose value we shall subsequently appreciate. And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice. I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

Man does not like to think his history is short, but so it is; so short that it is the merest instant in the Earth's history. To see this, to put man's life in context with the Earth's, imagine the whole history of the Earth compressed into the six-day week of the Biblical Creation; a scale that makes eight thousand years pass in a single second. The first day and a half of this week is too early for life, which does not appear until about Tuesday noon. During the rest of Tuesday, and also Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and well into Saturday, life expands and transforms the planet: life becomes more diverse, more stable, more beautiful; life makes a home for itself and adapts itself to live there. At four in the afternoon on Saturday, the age of reptiles comes onstage; at nine in the evening it goes offstage, but pelicans and redwoods are already here, lifeforms now threatened by man's wish to have the whole world to himself. Man does not appear on the Earth until three minutes before Saturday midnight. A second before midnight, man the hunter becomes man the farmer, and wandering tribesmen become villagers. Two-fifths of a second before midnight, Tutankhamon rules Egypt. A third of a second before midnight, Kong Fuzi and Gautama Buddha walk the Earth. A fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution begins. It is midnight now, and some people are saying we can go on at the rate that has worked for this fortieth of a second, because we know all the answers. Do we really know that much?

This small encounter had a disproportionately large effect on me. I saw myself in relief, separate and distinct from the others in the class, and even though he didn't speak to me in that way for a long time, I began to regard Professor Rose as a secret ally. This transformation took place gradually, and I can't say whether it existed solely in my mind or whether he was responsible for it. I know that I started to look forward to seeing him on Tuesdays, that his face was pleasing, his severity undercut by humor, and that I read the assigned books with new zeal.

THREE-DAYS-PER-WEEK OPTION If you’re pressed for time, or if you feel you don’t recover completely from four workouts a week, you can reduce this schedule to three workouts every seven days. You would simply train on any three nonconsecutive days per week, such as Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday). With a

Daily Living Practice Your practice this week is to deepen your awareness of what happens in your mind and your body when you are anxious, and to work on quieting your patterns of worry. As you go through each day this week, remind yourself to: Notice your worry patterns and begin to change them by challenging the fear with facts. Practice Powering Down to Transform Anxiety to experience the state of having a quiet mind and a quiet body. Comfort yourself, and challenge yourself to be victorious as you face small and large stresses throughout the week. Read the inspirational quote you have written on the index card. Daily Practice Log Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Time of Day B A B A B A B A B A B A B A Yoga/Meditation I Used Y-CBT Techniques I Used B = Before, A = After 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Low Anxiety Moderate Anxiety High Anxiety