We have a winner and Webb has a birthday!

First things first: Congrats to Chelsea Lawson, who won my bloggiversary contest! I let Rafflecopter pick the winning entry -- which is a good thing, because they were all so awesome that I would have had to give each of you a prize.

Chelsea picked July 18th because, she says, Webb was conceived on Halloween, thereby giving him the connection to spiders. My astrological resources say this would make his sun sign Cancer -- sensitive and emotional, and very attached to home and family.

In addition, Taurus and Cancer are compatible as friends -- which bodes well for Sage and Webb to continue being friends all their lives, once they get past the annoying-sibling stage.

This certainly takes a load off my mind. Thanks to everyone who entered. Webb and I really appreciate it.

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Now I'm going go and get all philosophical on you. Sorry in advance.

This graphic came across my Facebook newsfeed this week. It looks to me like the PostSecret page shared it originally, but as with many things social-media-related, who can tell for sure? In the same vein, the quote in the graphic is attributed to Buddha -- but like Abraham Lincoln says, just because you saw it on the intarwebz doesn't make it true.

According to Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist monk who blogs at fakebuddhaquotes.com, the quote is actually from Jack Kornfield's Buddha's Little Instruction Book -- which, according to Bodhipaksa, is not so much quotes from Buddha as it is Kornfield's re-interpretation of some Buddhist teachings.

He goes on to say that the same sentiment turns up in one of Carlos Castaneda's books, Journey to Ixtlan -- which might be why it rang a bell with me, as I read a bunch of Castaneda's books, once upon a time.

In any case, Bodhipaksa says the quote strikes him as a "deepity" -- something that sounds profound but, when you look deeper, ends up being trivial to nonsensical.

I dunno about that. If you read the sentence as saying we don't have as much time as we think we do, well, yeah, okay. That's a big duh. We often find that we don't have enough time to catch the bus, or to do the laundry, or to pursue our dreams -- big stuff and small stuff, we never seem to have enough time to get it all done.

But the quote seemed to me to be tweaking a mindset that a lot of us have, that someday, one of these days, we'll get around to all those big plans. We have a tendency to put off certain things that are important to us because we're sure we'll have time later. Right? Life is long, after all. We'll do it after the kids go off to college, or after we retire.

As I get closer to retirement age myself, I've been noticing a disturbing pattern: women who have worked in office jobs for decades are dying just a few years after they retire. Maybe two or three years after. Relatively few make it to a ripe, old age, and the ones who are living longest seem to be those who go into retirement with a reason to get up in the morning. I've read research fairly recently that seems to bear this out.

I'm not about to argue with a Buddhist monk about the profundity of a misquote I found on Facebook. But I figure it's not a bad idea to be reminded occasionally not to put off the important stuff.

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These moments of bloggy profundity have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.