Think on these things!

Take a moment to contemplate the word "responsibility." Think about what the word means. To whom are you responsible? What are you responsible for? Do you have "responsibilities"? What are they? How are you at fulfilling them?

To what end do you do what you do?

I recently finished reading Habits of the Mind, by J.W. Sire. Here is a quote that he used within the book:

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that makes us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." -Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Polak