| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: Indians, and not so distant from our destination, could we but have
found the way, I was entirely ignorant. The wisdom of my course
was soon the more apparent; for with all his pains, Ballantrae was
no further advanced than myself. He knew we must continue to go up
one stream; then, by way of a portage, down another; and then up a
third. But you are to consider, in a mountain country, how many
streams come rolling in from every hand. And how is a gentleman,
who is a perfect stranger in that part of the world, to tell any
one of them from any other? Nor was this our only trouble. We
were great novices, besides, in handling a canoe; the portages were
almost beyond our strength, so that I have seen us sit down in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: was extraordinarily cautious and, I may say, even parsimonious in
charitable matters. It is of course easy to understand, if one
considers the unlimited confidence which he enjoyed among the
subscribers and the great moral responsibility which he could not
but feel toward them. So that before undertaking anything he had
himself to be fully convinced of the necessity of giving aid.
The day after his arrival, we saddled a couple of horses and
rode out. We rode as we had ridden together twenty years before,
when we went out coursing with our greyhounds; that is, across
country, over the fields.
It was all the same to me which way we rode, as I believed
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: Bannigan, the thick, slow, laborious accountant and file-clerk; and four
freelance part-time commission salesmen.
As he looked from his own cage into the main room Babbitt mourned, "McGoun's a
good stenog., smart's a whip, but Stan Graff and all those bums--" The zest of
the spring morning was smothered in the stale office air.
Normally he admired the office, with a pleased surprise that he should have
created this sure lovely thing; normally he was stimulated by the clean
newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed flat--the tiled
floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling, the faded maps on the
hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale oak, the desks and
filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It was a vault, a steel chapel
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