Up: [[Mary Oliver]] Created: 2025-01-12 Shortly after or before retirement, I forget which, I came across this greeting card. ![[Greeting card of poem.webp|300]] Half a dozen years ago I made those three imperatives the instructions for *my* life. Two and a half years ago I enrolled in my first [Linking Your Thinking](https://www.linkingyourthinking.com) workshop, a life-changing decision, and my personal knowledge management system has been aligned with Mary Oliver’s words ever since. Correction. I live the greeting card version of Mary Oliver’s words. I’ve since learned that she wrote ‘astonished’ not ‘amazed’. For this public vault I changed to ‘astonished’ to honour her original words, but then changed back again. The two words describe the same experience, differing only in intensity. Since I’m trying to live it every day, I want the slightly more settled ‘amazed’. It’s too much pressure to be astonished all of the time! By the way, these four lines are not a complete poem, but rather are section 4 of a quite lengthy, seven section poem called [Sometimes](https://readalittlepoetry.com/2014/09/10/sometimes-by-mary-oliver/).