twenty-eight years and a million words
Today we arrived in Alice Springs, after another couple of days on the road heading from Melbourne to Adelaide. Adelaide seemed pretty sleepy, but that was fine with the travelling moose!
The weather in Alice was - get this - foggy. Foggy, in the famously dry, hot, and red Australian outback. I thought we'd been flown to Queensland!
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.
—John Gardner