“My heart is perfect because you’re inside.” – Hallmark Card

“The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

30 March

Imagine this: you’re a high school senior. You just finished class in your favorite subject. It makes no difference what that subject is: biology, woodwork, you name it. But that subject is what you have pursued as a career ever since. In fact, your contentment in that career is a major reason you’re content with life in general. Actually, all that is true because a few minutes earlier in this particular class, just as the bell rang, you said something of preternatural brilliance, something that represented a quantum leap of creativity, something so earth-shaking that the earth itself STOPPED its God-ordained rotation. You were dimly aware that other kids, packing up to go to their next class, were casting furtive glances at you as if you had just walked on water and had only just now landed back on solid ground. Then you saw your teacher seemingly floating in s-l-o-w  m-o-t-i-o-n toward you. He stopped right in front of you, then, taking both your shoulders in his hands looked you straight in the eye, and said, “That was simply brilliant. You’re really good at this, aren’t you?” And with all the pristine innocence, all the blossoming shyness of which the teen years are abundantly endowed, you looked back and said, a little awkwardly, “REALLY?!?”

“Can you withstand the fearsome assault of a raised eyebrow?” – Arnold Kunst

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

29 March

 “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I … I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

- Robert Frost

'What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.' - Ralph Waldo Emerson

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

March 30

'I appeal to you again to constantly bear in mind that with you - not with politicians, not with Presidents, not with office-seekers but with you - is the question “Shall the Union and shall the liberties of this country be preserved to the latest generation?”’

- Abraham Lincoln

“Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.” – Henry Van Dyke

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

March 29

Reconciliation had a long way to go in the days following Lee’s surrender. Edmund Ruffin, credited with firing the first shot at Sumter four years earlier, reacted to the news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox by leaving a farewell note decrying ‘the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race’ - then putting a bullet through his head. Not to be outdone, as it were, the famous Northern preacher Henry Ward Beecher, vitriolic as ever, foresaw eternal agony for the secessionist aristocrats – ‘guiltiest and most remorseless traitors, polished, cultured, exceedingly capable and wholly unprincipled…Caught up in black clouds full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punishment, [they] shall be whirled aloft and plunged downward forever and forever in endless retribution.’

 ‘Primates often have trouble imagining a universe not run by an angry alpha male.’

- Anonymous

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

28 March

Real power comes from harnessing the tremendous force of both the subconscious and the conscious mind. We’re meant to learn how they work together since their harmonious meshing together guarantees all the fabulous abundance our Father-God intends for us and for ours.

“The first to apologize is the bravest; the first to forgive is the strongest; the first to forget is the happiest.” - Anonymous

From “Lincoln 365,” by Arnold Kunst

March 28

The terms of surrender Grant presented to Lee at Appomattox were uncommonly lenient. Confederate officers, after relinquishing their arms and artillery were allowed ‘to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by the United States authority’ on the condition they never again ‘take up arms’ against the Union. They were also allowed to take their private horses as well as their side arms [‘their horses to plow with and the guns to shoot crows with’]. This provision, Lee observed, ‘would have a happy effect upon my army.’ As the brief meeting between the two commanders drew to a close Lee mentioned that ‘his army was in a very bad condition for want of food.’ Grant gave orders that 100,000 rations be provided for Lee’s scarecrow army of 25,000 men.

 ‘Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.’

 -William Shakespeare