The temperature on the beach at Gulf Shores was a breezy 72 degrees, but tensions were at a boiling point.

Ice was scarce among our group of college freshmen who’d drifted down from our squalid rental house to lay out our towels for day two of spring break.

As beer threatened to get warm, one friend tried to snatch a handful of Crazy Cubes from another. The ensuing shouting threatened to escalate into a full-on slap fight.

Let’s get one thing straight: The words we live by can truly come from anywhere.

My friend Grant Burnett looked on with excitement. A reporter’s son, Grant narrated the scuffle in the resounding voice that comes with his 6’10” height. He turned to me and said seven words that I will never forget:

“When ice becomes precious… Tensions. Run. High.”

Last week, I fell down a rabbit hole: how stories become folklore, and why certain proverbs stick.

Grant had made a proverbial observation—scarcity breeds conflict—and it's remained with me ever since.

It got me thinking about other phrases I return to again and again.

There were many places to look. My father repeats all sorts of proverbial observations, but many are not portable. “Never bet on a grey horse,” for instance, is not useful outside of a paddock—nor in one, in my experience. (My dad's unique relationship with language will be addressed in its own post someday.)

In my search for lore, I went a generation further back—from my father to his dad. The venerable Douglas Arbuckle Haddow. The only child of immigrants. An Ivy League medical grad. A general surgeon.

A core memory of “Buck” was a dinner table standoff where I was not allowed to leave until my food was finished. (In a gentler memory, he helps me don my Pikachu costume on Mardi Gras morning).

But neither of these stuck with me as more than memories.

Years after his death, while I was in high school, I learned of the words that he most often repeated: “Never take yourself too seriously.”

His wisdom served as a warning against self-importance and its cousin—lack of humor.

Folklore often travels this way, passed down by families and absorbed over generations. But that is not the only way we find proverbial wisdom.

Two years ago, I discovered another saying to live by: "Life is short. Light the candle."

This comes to us from the great Margot Bienvenu, the art-director-oracle with whom I share a desk at work. After her friends lost bottles of precious wine during Hurricane Katrina, she realized that she’d withheld pleasures from herself, waiting for the right occasion.

This riff on the all-time chart topper carpe diem rang true in its specificity and the moment in which I heard it.

My wife and I held onto candles for months, maybe years, without lighting them because we were waiting for some candle-worthy occasion deserving of a fine scent. Margot reminded me of a personally inalienable truth: every day is an occasion.

Unwittingly, I’d canonized three phrases that arose from wildly different characters and stories in my life: an ancestral sense of humor, the experience of college-era scarcity, and an admonition to live for the day.

We tend to think of folklore as stories of old, from places like the hills of Appalachia or the swamps of Louisiana. But I find that our own personal histories hold deep, sometimes quirky, influences to match.

So, I invite you to explore your proverbs. Where did your personal sayings originate? Do they represent where you come from or where you want to go?

A person, like a place, holds beauty and contradictions of their own. We are all walking examples of folklore.

Living legends, you might say.