let's call it a day

if for once I have to put myself in the third person point of view, observing me, I have to say I'm quite disappointed with what I see.

most notably after deadlines.

it's funny that sometimes the word death in many seemingly intelligent words of wisdom (or quotes) about death, can be beautifully replaced with the word deadline.

take "dying is like getting audited by the IRS--something that only happens to other people ... until it happens to you."

to "deadline is like getting audited by the IRS--something that only happens to other people ... until it happens to you."

or "you only live twice. once when you are born and once when you look death in the face."

to "you only live twice. once when you are born and once when you look deadline in the face."

thing is,

I was always intended to do many things seemingly impossible way before deadlines for some short period of days before deadlines, but what I see in front of me always gets in the way.

today I have to take two headache pills with several sips of coca cola to keep things together, then rubbing traditional extra hot embalming product on the head, neck, and back to keep me on my seat, only to produce a third of what I intended to produce way before the deadline.

oh well.

At least once again, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, too bad you can't beautifully replace the word kill with deadline as well..

Letter to the 6 billionth person

Dear little Six - Billionth Living Person: As one of the newest members of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won't be too long before you start asking the two $64,000 questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time.

 How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?

 Oddly - as if six billion of us weren't enough to be going on with - it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, innefable Being "somewhere up there", an omnipotent creature whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand. That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven, with at least one god in residence.

This sky god, it's said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or, he danced. Or, he vomited creation out of himself. Or, he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the singly mighty sky god is subdivided into many lesser forces - junior dieties, avatars, gigantic metamorphic "ancestors" whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust; for infinite power, for too easily broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it's only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.

Many of these stories will strike you extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of dead religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in "your" stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them, must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity.

It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it's true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods.

In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker's dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But here's something genuinly odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn't lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.

As a result of this faith, by the way, lt has proved impossible, in many parts of the world, to prevent the human race's numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the races spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen.

(If too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against sexually transmitted diseases.)

There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads and crusades, as they were in the Middle Ages. I don't believe them, or not in the way they mean it. Take a look at the Muslim world, or rather the Islamist world, to use the word coined to describe Islam's present day "political arm". The divisions between its great powers (Afghanistan against Iran against Iraq against Saudi Arabia against Syria against Egypt) are what strike you most forcefully. There's very little resembling a common purpose. Even after the non-Islamic NATO fought a war for the Muslim Kosovan Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much needed humanitarian aid.

The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their "sphere of influence." They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless - American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country's Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city's increasingly fearful Muslims.

The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don't look for the answer in story books. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it's the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcess of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.

The ancient wisdoms are modern non-senses.

Live in your own time, use what we know and, as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things. As the song says, "It's easy if you try."

As for mortality, the second great question - how to live? What is right action, and what wrong?- it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves.

To my mind, religion - even at its most sophisticated - essentially infantalizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us; the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things - female circumcision, to name just one - can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too can be ignored?

Well, no, it isn't, but the reasons for saying so aren't clear-cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitably fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals, but the conversation about that question. And it is much more than mere relativism, because it is not merely a never-ending talk show, but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended.

Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church and not the state.

This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it's also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part; once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

Imagine there's no heaven, my dear Six-Billionth, and at once the sky's the limit.

- Salman Rushdie

what you need to know about coal

I decided to write this post as a reminder to myself, and though my knowledge in the subject is highly limited, I never say that what I write here is the exact knowledge, as you can always try to google it.

everything is exactly what I have so far understood about the industry and why it is important to gain more knowledge. So here we go.

what you need to know about coal, specifically Indonesian coal.

Coal is in fact that black stuff, sometimes shiny most often not, obtained from simply digging the earth to a particular depth.

There are many methods to mine coal. You can specifically calculate how much chaos to create by blasting the earth, and avoid blowing it to smithereens, or just dig, as coal is contained at various ground levels (as far as I know) and will take form in seams, slices of earth.

Indonesia has yet to implement underground mining, which should be immediately implement if they really care about their forests.

The amount of ground you blasted and removed to reach the coal is called 'overburden', which miners will need to consider as input in the amount of money to pay if they happen to hire contractors.

Indonesia has some 104 billion tons of coal resource and some 21 billion tons of reserve (once again, these numbers are on top of my head. In its recent development, the number, apparently, has been revised, my guts say to attract more investors). But almost, or even more, 70 percent of these reserve are low rank coals.

Low rank coal is coal with specific calorific value, normally from 5,700 kcal/kg down to the lowest.

Australia has the highest reserve of higher rank coal, those with higher than 5,700 kcal/kg calorific value, and their biggest market is Japan, as they have in the early days designed power plants that require coal with higher calorific values.

Calorific value is the amount calorie in coal, the higher the water content, ash and sulphur, the lower the calorific value. Similarly, the higher the calorific value, the easier the coal will burn and vice versa.

This is why you will hear various measurements of calorific value in coal, such as NAR, GAR or ADB, they simply refer to when or at what stage the calorific value is being measured.

Higher calorific value coal, anthracite and coking coal, are mostly used in steel plants, while thermal coal is mostly used to create steam in power plants, as it is cheap and can create stable heat for power plants to run.

This is why coal is deployed to reach the benchmark power needs, while the remaining ever changing electricity need, such as when people turn all the lights and TVs at night or when people go to work and leave all electricity off by day, is provided through various other plants using other sources of energy.

The better illustration is when people turn off all lights, some things are turned on, such as your beloved fridge, and in a country, it is possible to have the lowest need of electricity at certain points, a level that will not go down any further. This is the benchmark which is supplied by coal powered power plants.

If you have questions why a country needs diesels or even LNG in their energy mix, while coal powered power plants are already available, it's because you can't simply turn off coal fired power plants, while diesel power plants can be easily turned on and off like your regular household generators, so it goes.

Modern countries use hydro, solar even wave and wind, countries like Indonesia use other natural resources they can burn.

Is it possible to increase the calorific value?

There are technologies that are called coal dryer, and gassification or others with similar purposes, that the Korean and Japanese have cleverly designed. Recent studies, nevertheless revealed that the available upgrading technologies are still uneconomical in a sense that the price of upgrading the coal, to have higher calorific value, make the coal more expensive than the coal already mined with the targeted calorific value. 

There are also called coal liquifaction technology, which the Germans had used to fuel their planes during the second world war (so I've been told) and the South African during the apartheid, as they were cut off from the rest of the world's oil.

Why Indonesia decided to import low rank coal, in addition to it being what the country has abundant, is because there's market for it.

Both India and China are some of the biggest coal producers in the planet, but they cleverly, cunningly decide to wait until the price is high before finally dig their own holes. that's my own opinion, but people have said that they have yet gained access to the coal source.

India has most of the minable reserves located below certain areas dominated by moslems (or is it communits?) who are in constant clash with the government, and to rely on coal exports, they have built power plants that can eat up even the least calorific value coal, down to 3500 kcal/kg, so they say.

India now face a problem where the price of imported coal remain higher than their price of electricity.

In the case of China, as most coal reserve is located in Mongolia, which is way at the top of the globe, import from countries divided by seas is cheaper. But rumors has it that they have build railroad for transportation.

Because transportation is key.

Logistic, so it says, make up for about 30 to 40 percent of the end price of coal. Using truck for land transport is cheap, but train is cheaper, and sea transportation is cheaper than trains.

This is why it's a lot cheaper for China to import its coal from Indonesia, through seaborne coal trade, than transporting their own coal from Mongolia through trucks and hopefully trains.

India is almost similar, but some of their reasons are that their reserve, despite being high, has those accessible to them considerably lower than their demands for energy, on an annual calculation basis, obviously.

In addition, their coal has high sulfuric content that can poison the air if released through the burning of the coal. This is why they need Indonesia's low sulfuric content coal as blending coal.

Like colors, blending red with yellow will get orange, and you can make orange juice.

Indonesia tries to cut logistic by creating mine mouth power plants, power plants that are built at the mouth of coal mines.

At least 17 percent of Indonesia's up to 346 million tons of coal production is imported to India, which accounted for almost 70 percent of their entire coal needs annually.

In addition, because the price gap between low rank and high rank is quite significant, both India and China's specific power plants, generally those that consists of 2 or 3 small MW steam engines, are designed to be able to avoid the steeper priced coal.

As Japan and Korea are stuck with their high rank powered power plants, they have conducted studies, invested billions of american dollars, to build technologies that can increase low rank coal's calorific values, so they can import from low rank coal producers.

Like wise, countries like Indonesia who desperately try to cut low calorie coal imports as domestic demands stay at about 24 percent of the total production, which folded to around 10 times in the last 20 years.

However these technologies, as previously mentioned, can not meet the logical economical calculation, in a sense that people will need to pay additional, say around 28 dollars, to dry a ton of their coal, probably increasing their calorific value, but allowing them to gain their water content back during stocking, hence becoming a waste of money.

People need to make profit, similar or even more.

I've also been informed that to use some of these technologies, people will need to pay annual patented right fee, another discouragement.

Yet, all of this  leads to a conclusion. If you plan to get a coal mine or purchase coal, some of the key inquiries are: what do you need the coal for? which lead to the calorific value of the coal. how much do you need? what is the average selling price per ton? do you need to secure supply? which lead to whether you should consider long term contracts or spot market. how will you get the coal? who will be in charge of delivering the coal to you? how much is the delivery will cost?

There's always the detail of whether the calorific value of the coal will stay the same by calculation from the moment it was mined down to the moment it reached buyers' power plant, Letter of Credit as payment, and so on and so forth.

Acquiring a concession is almost similar. How much is the resource? reserve? and mine-able reserve? in order to gain proper information about this, at which exploration stage the concession is currently undergoing? if it's already operational, how much is the output per month? per year? how was it's performance since it starts operating? what is the calorific value of the coal? and how far is it from the nearest bulk terminal? what transportation means are deployed unto the terminal?

And there's the external factors, such as regulations, law certainty and worse come to worse, the Churchill mining case.

The so on and so forth basically means that you will need to do your homework.

what I know so far about long term contracts and spot market is that coal producers normally sell about 90 percent of their output on long term contracts to guarantee security of finance.

the thing about long term contracts are that they may have signed a deal for one, two to three years, but the price is not immediately decided, but follows the ups and downs of coal prices which are then renegotiated between both buyers and sellers every year.

Spot, on the other hand, is an opportunity to gamble, in a sense to gain the most profit in accordance with the situation at the market. this means that in order to get the most profit, one will need to gain as much as understanding of the market, so they can make proper speculations with well managed risks.

coal under spot contracts does not necessarily more expensive than coal on long term contracts, though it does not necessarily cheaper as well.

There will be a condition in the market where heavy rainfall disturb production, or the accelerated productions of new players elevate supply over demands. And these are the types of information to get before jumping into spot markets, obviously if your company is not the one signing long term contracts with those whose productions are disrupted by heavy rainfall.

Two of the main coal producers in Indonesia is Kalimantan and Sumatra, though only the eastern and southern parts of Kalimantan are. Central Kalimantan was said to have the biggest high rank coal resource, but lack of transportation facility has managed to safely contain all resource.

Barito river is one of the biggest rivers that link Central Kalimantan to the shores of Banjarmasin, which expectantly, coal is then load up into bigger ships, notably Panamax or that one type vessel I completely forgot, into the seaborne market, transported to potential buyer nations throughout the globe.

You can try to google which part of Sumatra has the highest coal reserve, but the same transportation problems have prevented the island to get properly drained out of its resources. If ever a corrupt government can be 'beneficial' to a country is in these types of cases.

If you managed to pay attention to my sarcastic notes, these things are almost scientifically, if not redundantly, called 'resource nationalism', which Australia's recent decision and China's old decision to apply export tax on coal is one indication.

Indonesia's recent decision to force 51 percent divestment and talks of banning low rank coal export are the exaggerated, if not paranoid, indications.

Then again, it's their coal to begin with, obtained through hundred years of war in blood and sanity.

what's in my ipod

what music in my ipod does not automatically translates as what music I currently listen to, some are, but the other half are music I intend to listen, if I have the patient to wait for the particular bits that will intrigue my interests, however some are in constant play on any bike-ride, or heating Cornelius.

from most often being listened order, here are they

mew - and the glass handed kites

I once witnessed their live in a collective concert, and pretty much blown away. I instinctively realize that all the material brought in the concert came from this particular album, one I always have but failed to listen due to its nature of coming into my hand with another album by the now deformed Sikth.

the whole pieces blend together seamlessly and enjoyable from get go. Mew's androgyny vocalist (you can google for his name) did his part perfectly without trying to be someone else, no growl what so ever is present for a well arranged progressive-pop album.

despite being quite a fan of this album, I find it hard to listen to other of their stuff, and have often short in patience to wait for a hook.

the other fact why I like this album so much is anybody can sing to it if they can catch the breaks on each song, though blended with other songs, making it an enjoyable singing-to-a-tune experience.

opeth - ghost reveries

a considerably old release by opeth, an all time favorite prog-deathmetal band, or at least in this album, from sweden. the grand conjuration was the initial reason why I love this album, as it grew on me on successive listen. but I can swear to you that Mikael Åkerfeldt made the scariest growl I have ever listened to, and I have listened to a lot.

it is in this release that opeth, in my opinion, managed to sound exactly like it should, which is an understatement. I used to have the latest album in my ipod, but was deleted as I hardly listen to it.

a post in sputnikmusic illustrated it like, knowing your beloved girlfriend had changed into a hot sexy office woman who never wear nothing but miniskirts, hot, but not the reason why you're in love with her back in the days.

I guess each release by opeth cater to different types of listeners, and this one cater to my type of listener. this album by far have the most played songs in the ipod.

jaga jazzist - what we must

what we must represents the zen of music, the pinnacle of heartfelt symphony and the sky-is-the-limit types of arrangements. with ten active members all in all, the results are impressively out of this earth.

as the album that got me listen to the norwegian prog-jazz in the first place, I found myself unable to find anything on par with the mastery of this album, arrangement wise or ear-friendly wise, at least to my ears.

as far as european styles go, some of the best songs in the album follow the similar pattern of building up to a climax, ending them with a blast or a happy ending, a stellar performance carried flawlessly to no end.

the album managed to get me to some of the hippest norwegian musicians around, including Mattias Eick and band leader Lars Horntveth. for lack of a better statement, no ipod is complete without what we must in it, and what you must is make the time to listen to the album.

Egypt crisis looms

The crisis in Egypt is not over. At least according to this letter made public at one of the groups I followed,

I know this has nothing to do with the regular post I put in this stupid blog, but still, this letter deserves whatever publication it can get, serving its purpose as a notification, and a warning for those concerned.

the letter is courtesy of Harry Surjadi, sent by Joyce Barnathan who interviewed Yehia Ghanem.
ps. PressTV, whom I worked for six months back in 2011, also had an interview with Yehia Ghanem on Sept.11, 2011, before the following indictment.

------------------------

courtesy of PressTV

Now that the U.S. employees of the NGOs indicted in Egypt are out of the country, many Americans think the crisis there is over. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The International Center for Journalists has two Egyptian employees facing criminal charges that could land them in jail for five years.

Today, the Egyptians (and one American who chose not to evacuate) stood in a cage in a Cairo courtroom during a new hearing. One of them was Yehia Ghanem, ICFJ’s project director and a seasoned editor and war correspondent at the state-run newspaper Al Ahram. He was organizing our program for professional and citizen journalists when he was indicted.

All of us at ICFJ feel it is so important to understand how difficult this situation is for the Egyptians who work for U.S. NGOs. For that reason, I want to share with you excerpts from my exchange with Ghanem.

Q) What is the most difficult part of this ordeal?

A) When my 11-year old daughter called me crying over the phone to ask if I had taken a bribe from the U.S. to harm the national security of Egypt. The reason she asked: the investigating judges went public with the indictments without bothering to inform us—the accused—beforehand and at least give us a chance to let our families know before they went to the press. I was in the car on the way to my office when my daughter called me. I hurried home to find my children in a state of shock. I had to swear to them that their father is an honest man who would never betray his values, not to mention his country.

Now that the Americans under indictment are out of Cairo, what is the situation for you and the other Egyptians?

I do hope they will not sort out this fictitious case in the same political way it got started. For if they do, many questions will remain hanging over defendants’ heads in the eyes of the public thanks to merciless character assassination campaigns in the media. The best way to end this case is in the court of law, to prove not only the innocence of the wrongly accused, but also to expose how the whole situation was faked—and by whom. Such exposure will be a message for tomorrow's fakers not to be born today.

Many of us were distressed to see you and other Egyptian defendants put in a cage during the first hearing. What was going through your mind then?

Anger, pain and defiance are the right words. I got carried away by a variety of thoughts: How many out there deserve to be in the cage instead of me? How many people are at large and enjoying what they usurped from this nation, yet they are out there entertaining themselves by watching me in the cage?

How were the other defendants?

I saw a young lady, one of the defendants, crying her eyes out. She asked to hide behind my back—away from the photojournalists flashing their cameras. Then I felt even more angry over those who were forcing a 25-year-old to go through this ordeal.

I asked her: “Did you do anything that they alleged?” She swore to God that she did not. I said: “Then you should not feel ashamed to face the cameras. You should stand tall and face them. You should make them feel ashamed to force you into this cage.” Moments later, her tears dried up and she was standing beside me defying cameras.

You were about to be promoted at Al Ahram. What is your situation there now?

I was denied the promotion to chief editor after many colleagues took advantage of this faked case. They launched a campaign against me without giving me the right to respond. Some went as far as to call for banning me from the premises of Al Ahram. I do thank the chairman of the board who refrained from doing so. For now, I still hold the position as deputy chief editor.

A new court date has been set for April 10.

Yes, in spite of all this, I am going to trial, standing tall, believing in what I did, and knowing that I am being tried for things that I did not do. I am going to the trial with absolute trust in divine justice, in my country and in Egypt's judicial system. I do believe that Egypt is worthy of any sacrifice, even the soul itself, even if that means being dragged to criminal court on baseless charges. It is such a cheap price for a much better and more beautiful Egypt.

How is your family coping?

They are confident of my innocence and my integrity. However, they are suffering intolerable pain because of the fierce campaign waged by media against me. Meantime, I keep telling them that one thing I learned throughout the 18 years that I worked as a war correspondent is endless patience, which has become one of my favorite virtues. Also, I learned from this kind of journalism that you should not be afraid of the sound of a bullet. For as long as you can hear its sound, you know you are still alive. So the louder the noise from bad people, the more certain I am that I am alive and even kicking.
So please, remember that there still are people on the ground, who are fighting for their dignity, respect and livelihood in Egypt.


Best regards,
Joyce Barnathan
President
International Center for Journalists

live the moment

"I try to be strong" is inked backward on John Popper's chest, supposedly to remind him to try to be strong.

"live the moment" will be inked on my chest backward as a reminder of how important it is to live the moment, to see the details of trees, to peel an orange, to forget yesterday and start doing things today as the start of my entire lifetime with a new hype, everyday.

if my chest is in fact a huge bowl of pages, I might be tempted to ink all details of the words. including details of what these guys once said, at the start of their moment.

rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.
Montaigne

if you have one eye on yesterday, and one eye on tomorrow, you're going to be cockeyed today.
Some guy

you can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.
Jan Glidewell

waste not fresh tears over old griefs.
Euripides

Study as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
Isidore of Seville

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Sidharta

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Some wise Chinese dude

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Abraham Maslow

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
Charles Dederich

We are always getting ready to live but never living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.
Jean de la Bruyere

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.
D.H. Lawrence

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
Abraham Lincoln

Today is life - the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today.
Dale Carnegie

One should count each day a separate life.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Nothing is worth more than this day.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you are still talking about what you did yesterday, you haven't done much today.
Some dude who got hit by a truck

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus

Learning is movement from moment to moment.
J. Krishnamurti

We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God's.
Henry Ward Beecher

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

Today is the blocks with which we build.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.
David Gerrold

Life is a succession of moments. To live each one is to succeed.
Coria Kent

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy

If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.
Morris West

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.
Sir William Osler

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
Alan Watts

live the moment