| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: my uncle know, and said that if they would open the small gate in
the evening we would be near and could enter unobserved.
"At first he could not believe it was I, for by this time we
indeed looked like veritable beggars, but he was finally
convinced and promised to tell my uncle. After nightfall he
opened the gate and led us in by a back passage to my aunt's
apartments where she and my uncle were waiting for me. They both
burst into tears as they beheld my plight. Two old serving women,
who had been many years in the family, helped us to change our
clothes and gave us a bath and food. My feet had suffered the
most. They were swollen and ulcerated and the dirty rags and dust
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: Venetian. It was the first of July, and the city on the sea was
becoming tepid. A slumbrous haze brooded over canals and palaces
and churches. It was difficult to keep one's conscience awake to
Baedeker and a sense of moral obligation; Ruskin was impossible,
and a picture-gallery was a penance. We floated lazily from one
place to another, and decided that, after all, it was too warm to
go in. The cries of the gondoliers, at the canal corners, grew
more and more monotonous and dreamy. There was danger of our
falling fast asleep and having to pay by the hour for a day's
repose in a gondola. If it grew much warmer, we might be compelled
to stay until the following winter in order to recover energy
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: was served heir to my position in life, a landed laird, a bank porter
by me carrying my gold, recommendations in my pocket, and (in the words
of the saying) the ball directly at my foot.
There were two circumstances that served me as ballast to so much sail.
The first was the very difficult and deadly business I had still to
handle; the second, the place that I was in. The tall, black city, and
the numbers and movement and noise of so many folk, made a new world
for me, after the moorland braes, the sea-sands and the still country-
sides that I had frequented up to then. The throng of the citizens in
particular abashed me. Rankeillor's son was short and small in the
girth; his clothes scarce held on me; and it was plain I was ill
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