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A third journal of personal musings |
Prompt: "Opportunity is fleeting and judgment is difficult." Let this quote from Deborah Harkness inspire your entry I would like to start by saying that I rather enjoyed A Discovery of Witches and the rest of the trilogy. I had forgotten where this was at first, until I looked it up. To give context, the two main characters have gone back in time (16th century London to be exact). The FMC buys a silver gilded rat trap and it has an inscription engraved into it, the full Hippocrates aphorism: "Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.", but in latin. She makes a comment about the object being sentimental, considering what it was made for. The MMC replies back: "Sentimental? From the viewpoint of the rat, it sounds quite realistic: opportunity is fleeting, experiment dangerous, and judgement difficult." It is definitely a nice play with words! It does really highlight the meaning of the original quote in a short and quick manner. We are often given a lot of opportunities, some good, some bad, some in-between. Sometimes we take them and sometimes we don't. For me, those opportunities which we don't have much time to make a choice often make me nervous. I'm not a very spontaneous person by nature, so it is very hard for me to quickly pull the trigger on things like that, especially if it isn't obvious at first what type of opportunity it is. Or, especially if it an opportunity that can affect my life in a major way. This summer my fiance and I bought our first house! The housing market has been insane, if you've even had to sniff it in the last 4 years. It's calming down slightly in our area, but we were still really nervous. Buying a house is a big thing! We were nervous, as we're first time home buyers, of being out bid. $50,000 saved seems like a lot of money, but when $30,000 of it is the downpayment, we had to have 2 rooms painted (and decided to paint a couple others), plus buy a lot of new furniture, the remaining $20,000 didn't last very long. So, yes, we were nervous. Plus, how do you know if the house is the one? And if you do love the house, what happens if there are other bids and you aren't chosen? Fortunately, everything went incredibly smooth (we ended up putting in a bid on day 2 of the house being on the market (we ended up seeing it on the first day it was on the market). We just felt like we were home when we walked around the house. It had the comfort of new windows, new HVAC, new hot water heater, new carpet, all of the bathrooms and the kitchen had been updated. It was a wonderful feeling! Definitely a fleeting opportunity that was worth the "treacherous experience". |
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