"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult."  Seneca

"Nothing is as strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as real strength."  Ralph W. Sockman

"Happiness is the sense that one matters." Sarah Trimmer

"The future depends on what we do in the present." Mahatma Gandhi

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin." Ivan Turgenev

"Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." Les Brown

"There are two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle." Albert Einstein

"If we want our grandchildren to be able to give thanks for being Americans, we'll need to . . . start steering a course away from government control of our lives--and start moving back toward greater personal responsibility."  Ed Feulner

"Finish each day and be done with it.  You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can.  Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenly and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."  Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."  Albert Einstein

"The important thing is at any moment to be able to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."  Charles Dubois

"Life isn't fair.  You take the bad with the good, sort it out, then chuck what you don't want.  It's what you choose to keep along the way that makes you who you are."  Teggs, Book I: In the Light of the Passing

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."  Theodore Roosevelt

"Whatever you are, be a good one."  Abraham Lincoln

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."  Anne Frank

"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."  Buckminster Fuller

"Always do right.  This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest."  Mark Twain

"Never, never, never give up."  Winston Churchill

"Do or do not, there is no try."  Yoda

I just got done helping my son with his homework. Freshman algebra. Math has changed a lot since I was in school. We weren’t allowed to bring a calculator to class, now it’s a requirement. We had to write out the steps to every problem. That way, the teacher could check our work and see where we went wrong. My son only writes down the answers in his notebook. His work is done on scratch paper and is seldom collected and checked. His grades are based on quizzes and tests. It works for him–I prefer the more rigid structure of the 'good old days'.

He was solving a complex problem. "An eagle is perched on a cliff 145 feet above an open field. It sees a mouse. Folding its wings, it dives at its prey at a speed of 118 miles per hour. Approximately how many seconds does the mouse have to escape?" Wow. He’s ciphering away and I’m thinking, "Poor mouse."

He takes the height of the cliff where the eagle is sitting and its initial speed of descent, then plugs those numbers into something called a quadratic formula. After punching the calculator keys and figuring a few square roots he announces the mouse has about 2.13 seconds until it’s toast. Ah, the power of math.

But this is the real world and having had more experience in it than my son has, I have to challenge his announcement.

"Now wait a minute," I say. "The cliff might have been 145 feet high, but what if the eagle flew up a few feet before it dropped? Wouldn’t that change the answer?"

"But Mom . . . "

"And what about wind? Is there any wind–perhaps an updraft? And if the mouse sees the approaching shadow, would that lengthen its window of opportunity for escape?"

"I don’t believe you’re doing this . . " He rolls his eyes.

"And how much does the eagle weigh? Would a fat one drop faster?" I always have to push it. He’s closing his book, leaving me to sit alone at the table and ponder the poor mouse’s fate. "How do you know you have the right answer?" I call after him.

"Because the book says so." The door to his room closes and the echo of his remark is all that remains.

The book says he's right, yes it does. I can’t argue with that. I wish life could be lived by the book. Things would sure be simpler. After all, something with a name as important sounding as a quadratic formula has to be right. So what if I don’t understand it. What I do understand is that my teenage son still enjoys my company. He lets me help him with his schoolwork. That makes me very lucky–a lot luckier than that mouse.