“Rick Nelson had a song late in his career called “Garden Party.” The lyrics included the following: See, you can’t please everyone So you got to please yourself. I know exactly how he feels. It’s impossible to please everyone, and all you end up doing is spinning your wheels and wearing yourself out. In that case it’s better to stand up for yourself and do what makes you happy, what you really want to do, the way you want to do it. Do that, and even if your reputation isn’t so great, if your books don’t sell well, you can tell yourself, “It’s okay. At least I enjoyed myself.” You’ll be convinced it was all worthwhile.”
Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
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“But I wanted to become more than a slightly better version of somebody else. I WANTED TO APPLY MY CREATIVITY TO EVERYTHING I DID I wanted others to see me as I saw myself. Fear of failure? Why would I have any? I didn’t know where my dreams would lead. I had dreams, but I didn’t have all the pictures, because they didn’t exist. So I could push ahead with my eyes wide open, take in whatever happened, and move on. I wasn’t limited by someone else’s view of how my dreams should look, or whether they were reasonable or not.”
– Michael Jordan, Driven From Within
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I am not someone else, I am myself. But sometimes I feel far away from that person.
That distance is caused by trying to adapt myself for others. But I can never become another person, so why do I spend so much time trying to get there?
Better to take a deep breath. In through the nose. Pause. Out slowly through the mouth.
A reminder that all I have is the here and now. I can only breathe for myself. I can only think for myself.
So why persist in attempts to process the thoughts of others?
Why is it so hard to proclaim what makes me happy? To say, even in a tiny whisper, what I want to do?
I want to write. I don’t create these missives for anyone else. There is no gain or striving to be had. I write and publish here purely for my own satisfaction. This is a 100% selfish act.
With each day’s writing I move closer to myself.
Conversations With Quotations 