| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: at Christmas, are sometimes better parents in effect than those who
imagine that children are as capable of happiness as adults. Adults
habitually exaggerate their own capacity in that direction grossly;
yet most adults can stand an allowance of happiness that would be
quite thrown away on children. The secret of being miserable is to
have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure
for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the
pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and
active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of
it. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be
tired. Music after dinner is pleasant: music before breakfast is so
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twilight Land by Howard Pyle: other hand; nevertheless, there he felt the same hairy thing he
had felt before. He flung his leg over it, and away he was gone
through the air like a sky-rocket.
Now, he had grown somewhat used to strange things by this time,
so he began to think that he would like to see what sort of a
creature it was upon which he was riding thus through the sky. So
he contrived, in spite of his net and cap, to push up the
handkerchief from over one eye. Out he peeped, and then he saw as
clear as day what the strange steed was.
He was riding upon a he-goat as black as night, and in front of
him was the magician riding upon just such another, his great red
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: and the wooden swing-doors slammed beneath their violent gusts.
In the lower tunnels, trains of trucks kept passing along at
the rate of fifteen miles an hour, while at their approach electric
bells warned the workmen to cower down in the refuge places.
Lifts went incessantly up and down, worked by powerful engines
on the surface of the soil. Coal Town was throughout brilliantly
lighted by the electric lamps at full power.
Mining operations were being carried on with the greatest activity;
coal was being piled incessantly into the trucks, which went in hundreds
to empty themselves into the corves at the bottom of the shaft.
While parties of miners who
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