An old Tibetan story goes….

A very poor man, after a great deal of hard work, had managed to accumulate a whole sack of grain. He was proud of himself, and when he got home he strung the bag up with a rope, hanging it from the rafters of his house to keep it safe from rats and thieves. He left it hanging there, and settled down underneath it for the night as an added precaution. Lying there, his mind began to wander.
“If I can sell this grain off in small quantities, that will make the biggest profit. With that I can buy some more grain, and do the same again, and before too long I’ll become rich, and I’ll be someone to reckon with in the community. Plenty of girls will be after me. I’ll marry a beautiful woman, and before too long we’ll have a child…it will have to be a son…what on earth are we going to call him?”
Looking round the room, his gaze fell upon the little window, thorugh which he could see the moon rising.
“What a sign!” he thought. “How auspicious! That’s a really good name. I’ll call him ‘As Famous as the Moon’…”
At the very moment the words “As Famous as the Moon” issued from his lips, the bag of grain dropped from the ceiling killing him instantly.

From The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.

How often do we forget the present in our preparations for the future!

Unlike his comic alter-ego, Christopher Reeve isn’t coming back from this. Godspeed, good man.

Somewhere, deep in the depths of space, General Zod is smiling.