baby and toddler swap

"I'll give you two newborns for that cute eighteen-month-old..."

gopnik | accomplishment v achievement

"What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids' point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement - the competition won, the reward secured. The mystery of mastery, felt in the child's mind or muscles is more compelling than the concreteness of achievement, the trophy pressed in her hands." Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, Jan 29, 2018

virginia woolf | success

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion - the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

sometimes | sheenagh pugh

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.