i would like to remain not-dead for the foreseeable future

I used to visit [dad] in the hospital and he would write me these wonderful little poems.
I was in love with a man from Peru at the time so there would be a little poem entitled ‘My friend from Peru’ and another time it would be something else. Anyway, he died, just before the Second World War. Although I was engaged to the chap from Peru, there was no familiarity at all in those days, a kiss goodnight and that was it. Eventually, he went back to Peru and I was to go out to Havana and get married to him. In the meantime, I met Henry and fell in love with him and we decided to get married. Unfortunately, how it worked out with dates, our wedding day, 12 January 1940, was also the anniversary of my engagement to the chap from Peru and all these roses arrived and my mother was absolutely furious. She said, ‘What are you going to do with them then?’ and I said, ‘You put them on Dad’s grave’. So that was that and Henry and I got married.

//Kate Monro, 2013, Losing It: How We Popped Our Cherry Over the Last 80 Years

there is a lot you can do to help people become more creative. If someone tells you they cannot read or write, you don’t assume that they are not capable of reading and writing, but that they haven’t been taught how. It is the same with creativity.

//Ken Robinson, 2011, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative

There is also an unprecedented deluge of news and information and an insistent pressure to keep abreast of it all. A well-known British journalist was reminiscing about his early days in radio news. He joined the BBC in the 1930s at a time when there was no regular news bulletin. In his first week, a bulletin was scheduled and he arrived at the studio to watch it being broadcast. The presenter sat at the microphone and waited until the time signal had finished. He then announced somberly: “This is the BBC Home Service from London. It is one o’clock. There is no news.” The view of the times was that news would be broadcast if anything happened to warrant it. Compare this with our own saturated processes of news reporting 24 hours a day on a multitude of channels and media. It isn’t that there is more happening in the world now than there was in the 1930s. But there is now a ferociously hungry news industry, which generates, and sometimes manufactures, news stories around the clock to nourish its own bottom line. All of this adds to the general sense of crisis that permeates 21st-century culture.

Ken Robinson, 2011, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative