And on this beautiful morning I wake up thinking of my friend J.T., who so frequently likes to quote Hunter S. Thompson to me. I grab a cup of coffee and while my brain is warming up, I idly search and find:
“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
This, of course, leads to me searching for other quotes about the edge, thinking I’d find some sort of scientific-type things. Instead, I find Yo-Yo Ma:
“Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there’s got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you’re at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together.”
–Yo-Yo Ma
So then I click on the word at the bottom of the box that says “forward” and I get this:
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
– Lao Tzu
So, of course, I Google Lao Tzu, because I know the name and I haven’t had enough coffee yet to know why. Ah, yes, the father of Taoism. This, of course, leads me to Google “Taoism quotes”, which returns a quote from The Tao of Pooh, so I Google “Tao of Pooh quotes” and I get this:
“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, ‘This isn’t supposed to be happening this way,’ and trying harder to make it happen some other way.”
― Benjamin Hoff, Tao of Pooh
Which, of course, leads to a perusal of Winnie the Pooh quotes, including “You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
– A. A. Milne
I click “similar quotes” and get Dr. Seuss:
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
– Dr. Seuss
And that, my friends, is how you get from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to The Cat in the Hat. Six degrees of separation between the man who said “It never got weird enough for me” and the man who said “Being crazy isn’t enough.”
Well, perhaps that’s not as shocking as it seemed at first.