| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: what scant grounds he had upon which to venture any forecasts, he
felt as full of doubt as he had been of confidence last night. It
had been a saddening experience, but fortunate, for all that,
inasmuch as nothing serious had come of it, except that he was
greatly sobered. Martin could not understand that mysterious
something which had risen up in his nature and threatened to
wreck a carefully-built life. It was his first meeting with the
little demon that rebels in a man after he thinks his character
and his reactions thoroughly established, and he shuddered as he
realized how close the strange imp had pulled him to the
precipice. Yesterday, that precipice had seemed a new paradise;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: that the unhappy are never pleasing, and that all naturally avoid
the contagion of misery. To hear complaints is wearisome alike to
the wretched and the happy; for who would cloud by adventitious
grief the short gleams of gaiety which life allows us, or who that
is struggling under his own evils will add to them the miseries of
another?
"The time is at hand when none shall be disturbed any longer by the
sighs of Nekayah: my search after happiness is now at an end. I
am resolved to retire from the world, with all its flatteries and
deceits, and will hide myself in solitude, without any other care
than to compose my thoughts and regulate my hours by a constant
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Call of the Wild by Jack London: driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to
be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated. Of this last Buck
was never guilty, though he did see beaten dogs that fawned upon
the man, and wagged their tails, and licked his hand. Also he saw
one dog, that would neither conciliate nor obey, finally killed in
the struggle for mastery.
Now and again men came, strangers, who talked excitedly,
wheedlingly, and in all kinds of fashions to the man in the red
sweater. And at such times that money passed between them the
strangers took one or more of the dogs away with them. Buck
wondered where they went, for they never came back; but the fear
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