| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: by Faith is of course exasperated at this waste of precious time,
and I confess that during the first mild days <113> after the long
winter frost when it is possible to begin to work the ground,
I have sympathised with the gloom of the Man of Wrath, confronted in
one week by two or three empty days on which no man will labour,
and have listened in silence to his remarks about distant Russian saints.
I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation
that made me pity these people when first I came to live among them.
They herd together like animals and do the work of animals;
but in spite of the armed overseer, the dirt and the rags,
the meals of potatoes washed down by weak vinegar and water,
 Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber: She shut the rusty, sagging door very slowly and
gently. "No doubt the workmen who will come to
prepare the ground for the new library will laugh and
joke among themselves when they see the oven, and they
will kick it with their heels, and wonder what the old
brick mound could have been."
There was a little twisted smile on her face as she
rose--a smile that brought a hot mist of tears to my
eyes. There was tragedy itself in that spare, homely
figure standing there in the garden, the wind twining her
skirts about her.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: no such sums really existed in the world. He never had
supposed for a moment that so large a sum as a hun-
dred dollars was to be found in actual money in any
one's possession. If his notions of hidden treasure had
been analyzed, they would have been found to consist of
a handful of real dimes and a bushel of vague, splen-
did, ungraspable dollars.
But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly
sharper and clearer under the attrition of thinking them
over, and so he presently found himself leaning to the
impression that the thing might not have been a dream,
 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |