Inspiration..

Normally, I get a few calendars for myself every year. One to hang on the wall at home, one to hang on the wall at work, and a calendar to sit on my desk at work.. The two wall calendars show the entire month, and the desk calendar is a day by day thing.

Normally I get myself something humorous, like Non-Sequitur, Far Side, or something similar.
Sometimes humor calendars just feed my cynical side and I'm good enough at that without help.
Occasionally, like this year I get myself something I hope will inspire me.
I got the Ultimate 2008 Daily Desk Calendar, Inspirational Edition. And I'm trying to read that and be inspired, but so far.. not so much.

1) Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
2) Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
3) Nothing is predestined. The obstacles of your past can become the gateways that lead to new beginnings.
4) Convictions are the mainsprings of action, the driving powers of life. What a man lives are his convictions.
5-6) If you would create something, you must be something
7) Every artist was first am amateur.
8) Seek the lofty by reading, hearing, and seeing great work at some moment every day.

(The font used in the calendar rates very low on the readability scale, so I'm not attempting the author's names for these quotes.. google them if you like the quote and are thus curious about who said it)

And Today..

9) He lives long that lives well; and time misspent is not lived but lost.

Ok, of all those days, I like 5-6, and I like 8

But the script font on a blue background makes the quotes difficult to read and until I retyped them here I didn't actually "get" them, though I did actually read them two or three times so far.

That is in fact in part why I transcribed them here.. as well as to share the inspiration.

But the main reason.... Ok, I'll admit it, I'm here to complain about how uninspiring my inspirational calendar is so far.

I'm not really all that fond of boiling down a philosophical point to a fortune cookie, and by their very nature, that's what this sort of calendar is required to do. Maybe if I blog a bit on any day's inspiration I'll actually think enough about it to be inspired instead of just flipping to the inspiration for the day, reading it and thinking "Yea, right."

I tend to limit this blog to just my workouts, but it's also therefore my most frequently updated, but maybe I can make use of this inspiration to blow the dust of one or two others.