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Speak softly, leave your big stick at home and hide in the bushes.

What does not kill me can still leave me in a persistent vegetative state, which, let’s face it, isn’t much stronger than being dead.

What happens if you’re driving, a black cat starts to cross the road in front of you and you run over it with your car? Do you end up with really bad luck because the bad luck stored inside the cat comes out of its body all at once? Good luck because you destroyed the source of bad luck? For safety’s sake, you may want to be extra protective of the parts of your body it managed to cross before getting hit.

Newscaster describing a traffic accident earlier today:

“It happened at about 11:30 this afternoon.”

All you need is love… until you run out of air and asphyxiation sets in. Then oxygen becomes pretty important, too.

Announcement over the P.A. system in Walgreens:

“It is 10 minutes until 10:00. We’ll be closing in… 10 minutes.”

Go ahead, call me indifferent, see if I care.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, pay a little kid a dollar and have him yell it out to everyone for you.

Overheard in the hall:

Someone: “Hey, Carol, when is your Halloween party going to be?”
Carol: “On Halloween. Isn’t that clever?”

My mother was a school teacher before my brothers and I came along and she’s has had the pleasure of meeting some of her students years later and learning of their life’s adventures. (Incidentally, they usually remember what a good teacher she was…) One of those students, Patrick Milan, is going to a peace conference in Switzerland this fall and will be bringing 13 camping chairs (similar to this) with him, each with a simple word on the back.

He was biking around the lake today asking for donations to help fund his trip. In exchange, he offered a book he wrote (Inspiration Point) and let us write our own message on one of the chairs. I’m supposedly the wordsmith of the family—I know, you’re all shocked—so they asked me to write something when we gave him our donation. After all, “God blesses us all with peace” and “Peace be with everyone” gets old fairly quickly. Out of the two chairs he brought today, I chose the Patience chair instead of the Courage chair and left this message:

Peace is always in front of us—we just need to look for it.

Not the most inspirational statement I’ve ever made, but it’s important to remember: Look for peace and it’s already there for you.