"Priming the Pump" or "Wisdom from the Wells of Others"

         Priming the Pump... what that originally meant likely is lost on many today.  A New York Times article not long ago noted that it is now arguably " ' a dead metaphor', or a metaphor in which the original evocative meaning is largely lost" since few now have a home water pump that needs to be primed to function.  Probably it is most often used for a stimulus to jolt an economy into recovery.

     My writing has been going through a 'dry spell' so I decided to jolt my muse by being attentive to the observations of others.  Recently, I found a notebook that  I once kept of pithy quotes that I had read.  What follows are some that I found to be 'spot on', especially those that focused on attitudes about aging, since I'm now closing in on my 82nd year:

  .from May Sarton, The House by the Sea:
   .."There as many ways of growing old as of being young, and one often forgets that."
  .."Tidying things up clears the mind..." (a favorite of my wife's)
  .."One of the good elements in old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are."

  . Doris Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude:
   .."There is something almost holy about the silence of early morning."
   .Grumbach, Coming Into the End Zone:
    .."Everything is different since it changed.."
    .."Progress, an illusion that persons living only in the present , ignorant of history, possess."
  .."Sadly, places pass out of one's life the way people do."
  .." Graffiti at the University of Michigan: 'It often  shows a fine command of the English language to say nothing."
  .."Each age of life is new to us;; no matter how old, we are still troubled by inexperience."
  .."Letters are history. They are the savored and saved past, the instigators of memory. Telephone calls [emails and texts also] are the ephemeral present and play a part only in the immediate future."

  .Donald Hall, Lifework
    .."Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working ."

  .Linda D. Jenkins, Journey of a Returning Christian
     ."But I think questions are healthy.They mean we are still paying  attention."

  .George Sheehan, Going the Distance: One Man's Journey to the End of His Life
   .."Wisdom is a product of a process. This process begins with information, proceeds through knowledge, and through what a less gifted poet, Edgar Guest, called 'a heap of living', ends in wisdom."
   . "The step from knowledge to wisdoms the longest one in a person's life"

   .Kaye Gibbons, A Virtuous Woman 
    .."Sometime we could all use a lesson in saying quiet."
    .."You can't ever just throw words out. They have to land somewhere."

  Now, I hope that these 'borrowed words' land somewhere that 'prime the pump' for the 'living of these days.

    Satchel