| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur.
Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it,
nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half
the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed.
When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had
no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it
or even take any particular notice of it.
But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of
seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens
that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea,
people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum: enough to make anybody nervous. He groaned, too, as if frightened,
and the wings creaked dreadfully because the Wizard had forgotten to
oil them; but they kept fairly good time with the wings of the buggy,
so that they made excellent progress from the start. The only thing
that anyone could complain of with justice was the fact that they
wobbled first up and then down, as if the road were rocky instead of
being as smooth as the air could make it.
The main point, however, was that they flew, and flew swiftly, if a
bit unevenly, toward the rock for which they had headed.
Some of the Gargoyles saw them, presently, and lost no time in
collecting a band to pursue the escaping prisoners; so that when
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: relief, like the awakening from an uncomfortable dream: their lives
at once reverted to the calm which they had breathed for thirty
years preceding the national disturbance. In their ways they had
not materially changed for a hundred years. The surplus produce of
their farms more than sufficed for the very few needs which those
farms did not supply, and they seldom touched the world outside of
their sect except in matters of business. They were satisfied with
themselves and with their lot; they lived to a ripe and beautiful
age, rarely "borrowed trouble," and were patient to endure that
which came in the fixed course of things. If the spirit of
curiosity, the yearning for an active, joyous grasp of life,
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