Oddments of High Unimportance

“Time” is related to how much information you are taking in – information stretches time. A child’s day from 9am to 3.30pm is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children experience many new things every day and time passes slowly, but as people get older they have fewer new experiences and time is less stretched by information. So, you can “lengthen” your life by minimising routine and making sure your life is full of new active experiences – travel to new places, take on new interests, and spend more time living in the present – see Making Time by Steve Taylor .

Many people understand movement is required to get them where they wish to be, yet they hesitate to step into that movement. We understand that you hesitate because you don’t want to make a mistake, but such thinking is faulty and we will tell you why. You cannot make a mistake! It is impossible! If you have surrendered and entered into the flow, your guides and helpers will be assisting you, instantaneously, to help you get where your soul desires to go. It doesn’t matter which direction you take your first step in because the flow is self adjusting. The important thing is to take that first step, in any direction, because you cannot guide something that is not in motion, Dear Ones! Again, we love you for your mindfulness, but now is not the time for stagnation. Using surrender and flow with intention is mastery in motion, and a wondrous thing, indeed. Feel free to step into movement without fear, knowing that all movement is forward movement and will take you, without fail, to the place of highest good. ~Archangel Gabriel

pjeby: “the problem in procrastination is we resist concrete [thoughts] while engaging in pleasurable [abstract thoughts]." http://t.co/1HkLArSz

Like many other Americans, I became aware of Hughes through his "Shock of the New" documentary and considered myself lucky to snag a copy of the hardback from a remainder table at the (long-gone and lamented) Intimate Book Shop in 1983. Most people can name critics of movies, music, and books because we hear those products talked about on NPR or Entertainment Weekly. Art critics -- not so much. The only one I could name with any confidence would have been Hughes. I did not read much of his stuff, but like Gore Vidal or Pauline Kael, I had only to read a few lines and I could hear the cadence of his prose, and the stunning way he could put together a sentence. I always liked his boisterous charisma and certainty.

The following paragraph is from his memoir, "Things I Didn't Know." Thanks to The Daily Beast for bringing it to my attention.

“I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist [shit], no matter how much the demos love it.”

—Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know

pjeby: If you aren’t at least a little grateful for what you have now, what makes you think you’ll be any more grateful when you have more?

If everything seems under control,” said auto racer Mario Andretti, “you’re probably not moving fast enough.