Like a Persian carpet the weave of time pushed their lives into a pattern.

In India there’s no modernism without barbarism. Strip away the young man’s face and you’ll find an old man’s mind.

The most perplexing yet marvellous phenomena to me so far, is that connecting the dots and seeing patterns of one's life only happens backward and time only happens forward.
You can't catch a pattern from the future and you can't catch time from the past. Only by the memories from the past a one tackles the complexity of the present and uncertainty of the future and while everything changes, the mechanism is always the same, and this itself is a pattern.

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our
environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this
solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

One breath as a saint is better than an eternal life as a sinner