This week on my morning jog around the Beach Bar Lake, I turned the corner, stopped and snapped this photo. The scene struck me. It offered a path. It offered hope to those who believe that tomorrow can and will be better than today.
For reasons I don’t fully understand, it also reminded me of a quote from The Empire Strikes Back – after Yoda raises an x-wing from the Dagobah swamp:
LUKE: I don’t believe it. YODA: That is why you fail
As I jogged, I thought about how as we journey together in this upside down world, believing in better can be challenging.
The words believing in better connected me to a song by Lennie Gallant, a legendary Singer / Songwriter from Prince Edward Island. I stopped and hit play on his song, Believing in Better, on the album of the same name (available on streaming services). It was the perfect connection to the image… as I jogged forward into the rising sunlight. As he sings in the chorus:
Don’t let it go, don’t let it fade,
Believing in better when things get worse.
Here’s the song on Apple Music
My conclusion as I jogged listening to the title cut and others on the album (well worth listening to by the way), was that believing in better is a choice.
We can choose to believe in better or chose to believe in worse.
I choose better 🙂
Dale Degroff’s Classic Cocktail Book was updated and published this week “The New Craft of the Cocktail.”
Dale is the definitive expert on cocktails and cocktail techniques. What I also LOVE in this revised edition is he has highlighted cocktails from craft bartenders and those that he has created or optimized himself. They alone are worth the cost of the book.
My recipe this week is from the book – it’s one of the “craft” recipes – this one from David Thompson of the Capital Hotel in London who won first prize with this drink in the first annual London Absolute Vodka Cocktail Contest.
It’s called ABSOLUTELY BANANAS – and it gets a big thumbs up from my wife
Add the following ingredients to a shaker:
- 1 1/2 ounces of Vodka
- 12 ounces of Creme de Banana Liqueur
- 1 1/2 ounces of Pineapple Juice.
As dale explains, shake very hard to a slow ten count – a layer of foam from the pineapple juice will float on top of the drink and make a great presentation.
Cheers,
Doug
Steven Covey teaches that everything of substance is created twice. First is the vision of what could be achieved, and the next is the action to achieve it. I also believe in the flip side of Einstein’s definition of insanity — if we want to achieve something we’ve ne er had, we must be willing to do things we’ve never done. And those concepts require the choice to believe we can make things better. I also choose to believe in better and to embrace the changes that are required to make better happen.