A Quote by Lauren Beukes
Traffic in Joburg is like the democratic process. Every time you think it's going to get moving and take you somewhere, you hit another jam.
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People are going to think and take things how they're going to take it, and I have no control over that, so it's kind of like biding time until you get your feedback. So, it's like, once the public can consume what you're putting out there, then you know. Then you know hit, miss, in between.
You are going somewhere. Every day. Every experience you get. You're moving forward.
America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament.
Doing stand-up comedy is in the middle of a traffic jam getting everybody moving again.
When I was learning how to box, that was the number one thing my trainer taught me. He said you can't get angry at every single time I hit you because that's why you're here. You're going to get hit. Acknowledge that you're going to get hit and now focus on how you're going to fight properly. And living through the times is exactly the right way to put it because I have seen a slice of this only on a different continent.
Just work. Don't wait. Everybody's waiting until they have the perfect idea to start working. Even if you have an inkling of what you want to do, start moving towards it. And it's going to flesh itself out through the process of moving towards the goal. And by the time you get to where you're going to be, it's not going to look anything like it did when you sat on the couch thinking about it. And if you wait until it's perfect in your head before you get of the couch and start working on it, that's never going to happen.
Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.
When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. Four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam.
But everything that I did starting out, every job that I had, I haven't regretted any of them. They've all been informative, interesting in one way or another. With a career, I think there's this idea that you're just trying to get somewhere. It's like, "Oh, okay, let's keep going, because if I do this, I can get this, I get this, this." It wasn't that way. I did what I wanted to do when it was in front of me, and I'm trying to continue to do that.
Only the British could experience great pain at the thought of a traffic jam - a place where you can sit alone with your radio on without being expected to do any work. Aren't traffic jams unbearable? By the time you get home, you need to sit alone in a comfy chair with your favourite music on just to calm down.
If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly you get it as an antithetical process, so you have to have an environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation.
Self-knowledge is not the knowledge of a dead self, self-knowledge is the knowledge of the process of the self. It is an alive phenomenon. The self is not a thing, it is an event, it is a process. Never think in terms of things, the self is not there inside you just like a thing waiting in your room. The self is a process: changing, moving, arriving at new altitudes, moving into new planes, going deeper into new depths. Each moment much work is going on and the only way to encounter this self is to encounter it in relationship.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.
Motherhood has never been an ambition. I don't think like that. I never have expectations like, 'When I'm 19 I'm going to do this, and by the time I've hit 25 I'm going to do that'. I just take things as they come, each day at a time, and if things happen then all well and good.
I think that knowing where you're going is important, and it's not like, when Robert says that, it's not like we know what every episode of the next five, four, five, six seasons of the show is going to be. I think Matt Weiner knew how Mad Men was going to end. Vince Gilligan knew how Breaking Bad was going to end. Marc Cherry knew how Desperate Housewives was going to end. Along the way, the process of crafting those stories ... You don't know what the road, what twists and turns that road is going to take to ultimately get you there.
Almost every time I go to the ocean, I think about throwing my phone right into it. Sometimes, you pull that thing out of your pocket, you look at it, and you're like, 'What was I just going to do with this? Was I going to take a note? Was I going to check my email? Was I going to take a picture?'
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