GLIMPSES

GLIMPSES

Some observations and interpretations remain meaningful when compressed or abbreviated. If you scroll through to the end of this series of my glimpses, you will see a few of them which were published on postcards in 1975 and then reproduced in a booklet entitled "MINIATURES". The eight patriotic cards, shown first in the card series, were inspired by the then upcoming American bicentennial year.

A few of the text-only commentaries, which follow immediately, may have been voiced by me in my conversations, and incorporated in my correspondence or my other writings, but most are used and published here for the first time.

Lawrence Edward Bodkin Sr.

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It may truly be more blessed to give than to receive. But one must first receive in order to have something to give; and the more one can receive, the more one has to give.

Attitude is an emotional consequence of opinion.

Silence only achieves its golden hue when framed by a thoughtful word or two.

The difference between practice and theory is the difference between reality and opinion.

If we are at first curious enough to ask a question, we should then be wise enough to question an answer.

The most miserable of existences includes some small enjoyment that only the continuation of life can sustain. Life has many questions perhaps too few answers and there is only anecdotal evidence of anything beyond. In death all have been made eternally mute.

Was it nurture or nature that made you this way? Nurturing only works on what nature supplies and I really don't want to say.

The best is not always the most difficult to obtain. The most difficult to achieve is not always the most meritorious.

We should not let tigers eat us simply because they are hungry and can't help being tigers.

We must not overly rely upon the learning experience some mistakes can be made but once.

If you never bite off more than you can chew, and never chew more than you can swallow, you cannot hope to reach a rainbow's end or clear a path for others to follow.

Science is a "Superman Cape" with a lunatic fringe.

Intelligence has enabled humanity to evolve its adaptations for survival within a lifetime and to thus exceed the rate of any development provided by evolution.

Any dog knows that if its bark is good enough, it won't often need to bite.

If you deliver more than you promise, you can succeed and be like a hero. If you deliver the very same thing but you have made others expect much more, you may end up looking like a zero and then be branded a braggart and bore.

There is only one chair in a one-man band, and nobody wants to sit on the floor.

If familiarity truly breeds contempt, it can explain why most of us have a continued respect for money.

What a person can hope to achieve depends as much upon where they are able to stand as it does upon how far they can reach.

If you've lost your carefully nurtured health, and there's no accumulated wealth, and you can't even give away your precious purity; when your years draw to a close, the thing that will keep you on your toes, is your good old anti-social in-security.

When we cannot identify or define, there is opportunity to determine the truth, as well as the freedom to more conveniently decide it. Unfortunately, this dangerous practice is reinforced when what we decide to be true, is occasionally true.

May the hurt of our parting always be healed by the thoughts of our meeting again.

Dishonesty respects the value of honesty. There is little advantage in cheating at cards unless you are the only one cheating.

Bootleggers are always willing to fund a church's campaign for a dry county.

The timely toss of a coin, the arbitrary edict of a tyrant or the counsel of a fool has often been of greater value than careful consideration when it has relieved the paralysis that permitted humanity to suffer its behavioral extremes. We benefit from referential guidelines, religious or secular. While careful thought should be applied where possible, It is often more important to draw lines between good and bad than to precisely determine where the lines can be agreeably drawn.

The wisdom of immediate decision may often exceed the need for careful consideration. We must look before we leap, but not so long that we fail to move effectively, like a deer transfixed by the lights of an approaching car.

We often regret that we sometimes forget, but if we didn't forget we'd have much more to regret.

Prejudice is often learned. Prejudice is often earned.

People who can rest on their laurels are wearing them in the wrong place.

What one religion finds most offensive in another is seldom so much a matter of conflicting theology as it is the cultural behaviorisms that interpretations of the religions have come to permit.

The entertainment media is capable of glamorizing any behavior to the extent that it becomes enviable and worthy of emulation. While this could be employed to our benefit as well as our detriment, it is much easier and more profitable, for such a commercial enterprize, to pander to weaknesses than attempt to improve character.

Twinkle and twinkle my enormous star, you seem so small when I see from afar, I know you are not as you seem to be, but my life is short and I might not see, if you have emerged like a butterfly, a bright-lit nova that will dimly die. Light gave us your past and then something more, for what we know now is more than before. Your twinkle is gone when you're viewed from space, a telescope lets me see every trace, but I want more than my science will allow, I want to know what and where you are now.

Freedom is yours, and freedom is mine, and there is freedom for every sister and brother, but if an increase in yours means a decrease in theirs, you may need more freedom from each other.

Complete, unregulated freedom is like a busy intersection without traffic lights.

It seems only reasonable that strangers enjoying improved conditions should defer to the resident culture responsible for such conditions. It is not reasonable that they should seek to enjoin and alter that which they came to admire.

We are never so old and unreliable as the memories of our youth.

Too often we do what we have to do to repair what we did when we rashly did what we wanted to do.

What is, just is. What is not, is not and what hardly can be occurs infrequently.

We seek equality from our superiors; We seek superiority from our equals.

No one cares very much if you act superior so long as you are not superior.

Congratulations today, "you can't take it with you" they say, but I can easily tell since some can keep it so well that they must have discovered a way.

The present is such a busy place, where our future turns into the past, cause and effect of the present forge, future patterns that never can last, each new present becomes a moment, that is melted as soon as its cast, we live in the heat of such moments, just now, between future and past.

Reality is as an unfamiliar play, sequentially scripted in a most artful way, by the forces and substance of which we are part, with impossible end and unknowable start.

Most of the faults of our day are in a typographical way, but the type has been set my inquisitive pet, and the printing seems well underway.

So, you've made a big hit and you're proud of it. It feels like you've just won first place.

But there's more to be done, and you still have to run, if you want to get to first base.

When we're nearly "in" we are so full of doubt, that before we know it we're on the way "out." When we're nearly "out," we relax and win and before we know it, we're on the way "in."

I do not always hold a belief as an advocate of that belief but as an advocate of what I sincerely believe to be a truth. I cannot therefore choose what to believe, just as I cannot choose the sum of a numerical addition, I can only provisionally accept what appears to be true.

When I seem a bit distant, I am just getting far enough away to see the whole picture.

Perhaps there is one advantage in ignorance: When we don't know how something is supposed to be, we are more likely to appreciate it for what it is.

Those who have no reputation to lose and no real expectations to meet will win praise for whatever they achieve and if they fail, not suffer defeat.

Fresh winds rush to fill our eager sails when we approach an election autumn, but we hear of late that our ship of state has gone aground and fouled its bottom.

If the lion shall truly lie down with the lamb, the lamb should not be expected to get up again.

Rights without means are meaningless rights.

Democracy could reasonably be described, from one point of view, as a form of government in which responsibility for the many mistakes of leadership can be borne by the voting public.

If our Constitutional Republic now claims to be a form of Democracy in which majority rule seems less than right, are we to be left with minority rule? Gravitation toward a smaller, ruling class always seems to have been an unavoidable eventuality.

Government "of the people, by the people, for the people" shall surely perish from the earth, again and yet again, but with ever impending rebirth, until we learn to learn why it dies and find a way to sustain it.

Where water levels are equal there is no flow; Where temperatures are equal no winds will blow.

Equality of forces and substance is rare in nature. It is inequality and an ever-seeking, never-reaching pursuit of equality that activates the Universe.

Social equality is apparently to be justified by an equivalency of attributes; a compendium of compensating qualification in the prejudgment of the law and in the regard of a Deity where individuality and equality can be said to exist simultaneously.

No government by the people can be wholly for the people, for those concerned with their livelihood cannot be sufficiently concerned with government to benefit by the wise selection of those whose livelihood is government.

We all are typically uninformed in some areas and therefore likely to make unwise decisions relating to them. Democracy, as presently interpreted, makes no distinction in this regard, affording our uninformed and unwise decisions the same power to affect our future as the wisest. This explains much regarding our problems. Perhaps it will point the way and eventually lead us to their solution.

Lawrence Edward Bodkin, Sr.