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{ 2012 04 17 }

Never Walk By A Red Dress

Another post about Buck O’Neil and The Soul of Baseball.

Buck shook his head and looked me in the eyes. And very slowly, with a teacher’s edge in his voice, Buck said this: “Son, in this life, you don’t ever walk by a red dress.”

Buck was answering a question about why he (a 94 year old) was flirting with a 20 something – but I think the point he was making goes beyond attractive women in red dresses.

Ferris Bueller said it as, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Of course Ferris is fake, Buck O’Neil is real.

The Buddha talked about the importance of mindfulness- of fully experiencing each moment we have on this earth.

It’s all the same point. We can go through life on auto-pilot, checking things off our to-do list without really experiencing what we just completed, in a rush to just get through the list. Or we can slow down, realizing that 80% of our to-do list probably doesn’t actually have to get done, and fully experience the 20% that matters. If we do that, I think we all find a lot more red dresses in our lives.

Posted by Chris ODonnell on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at 12:33 pm. Filed under Books, Random. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

{ 2 } Comments

  1. Ryan | April 17, 2012 at 1:34 pm | Permalink

    One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever read was, “You’re going to die with a full to-do list. Deal with it.”

    Makes it a little easier to not focus so much on an end goal of a clear to-do list, since you’re never going to get there anyway.

  2. Lynn | April 18, 2012 at 12:39 pm | Permalink

    Picking up on Ryan’s quote and for home renovators like myself, I’ve always liked the (Japanese?) saying: “House all done? Time to die.”

    Thanks for the reminder about what matters, by the way. :)