What Is This?
I remember No. 1. It was in the first year of the 21st century, the year 2000. I was in an airplane, in the middle seat with no coat and nothing to read except the in-flight magazine. It was a three-hour flight, and I finished reading the magazine in 20 minutes. I found a page in the magazine with a lot of blank space and wrote this in blue ink in the white space: “Live the discipline of no expectations.” That’s it. I stared at it for the rest of the flight. As I left the airplane, I tore the page out of the magazine with that first adage written on it. I still have it.
I have always been a fan of the aphorism. From youth, I admired the big boys of the genre—Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Oscar Wilde. After I wrote my first book, people asked me, “What’s it about?” (This question really means, “Tell me the theme so I don’t have to buy it and read it.”) I made up a one-sentence summary and said it over and over to anyone who asked the question. It got so I wondered why I wrote the book at all when I could have just written the one-sentence summary and been done with it.
I liked the first adage so much I wrote about 3,000 more. Most appear in notebooks and on bits of scrap paper. Strangely, there are exactly 1,000 good ones. On this website, I intend to publish them all, one day at a time for 1,000 days starting January 1, 2025.
My identity is meaningless. The less you know about an author the better. Biographies about writers are really about the biographers. The art is the only that thing that lasts. What I had for breakfast on April 1, 2003 is of no importance compared to the adage I wrote that day. The details of my life are interred with my bones; only the words survive.
One adage never seen before is revealed at the same time every day for 1,000 days. That is all this website is and will ever be.
If you need a name, call me Wise Randolph, a wandering consciousness in the waking world.