July 25, 2016

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Having returned from Manchester after a long weekend, where we celebrated my elder son’s graduation and ensconced him back at home, I returned to the booklet and ruminations. On Change:

  • Change what is in your power to control (if it needs changing).
  • Lasting change cannot be imposed externally.
  • Change requires a vision of a better alternative.
  • The vision must be followed by resolve, motivation, and a practical plan of implementation.
  • Change whatever is self-destructive, harmful to others, mindless, routine, numbing, unhealthy, ill-fitting, burdensome, unnecessary, unwanted, and without evident benefit.
  • The greater the change, the greater the effort required to bring it about.
  • Great change can only occur over a significant period of time.
  • Change requires effort to maintain it. The force of gravity exerted by that which you are intent on changing will tend to pull you back towards itself.
  • Change may require endurance, discomfort, and sacrifice in order to be effectual.
  • Change can be either dramatic, gradual, or imperceptible. (Sometimes the most enduring and significant changes take place when we think that change isn’t taking place at all.)
  • Types of change: relinquishment or abandonment, conversion, modification or adjustment, and redirection.
  • Nothing remains the same. If you don’t change something, it’ll slowly change by itself … but not necessarily in the way you’d like.
  • There are times when we need to expend energy preventing a change from taking place.

By lunchtime, I’d developed a further ten pages of the booklet. Afternoon. I continue, in the hope of inserting all the main body text by the close of the day.

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Guests’ walkway, graduation, Whitworth Hall, Manchester University (July 22, 2016)

In the end, my ambitions were thwarted by a file-deletion crisis regarding the SD card I used to photograph my son’s graduation on Friday. Having administered the requisite software program, the information was restored. Today, few things besides the soul are irretrievably lost.

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