A modification on a work by Kyle Winton.
Winton, Kyle. Silkscreen Poster “Good Things Come to Those Who…”. April 2012.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/430062470/silkscreen-poster-good-things-come-to-those-who (accessed April 11, 2012).
google-free is the new microsoft-free. — @egbloom
That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? … Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them. Bonus: tweet or blog a photo of your post-it.
I am surprised to have found another Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that I so thoroughly disagree with. No, not at its heart, no where its real meaning lies, but it is with its surface that I disagree. It is true that you will not make a Shakespeare by studying Shakespeare. It is not true that you will create a great poet and playwright in the study of Shakespeare and the application of that study. I guess my heart says that we, along with our Maker, make us our selves in the space that occupies the gifts that the Maker has given us. If we can discover how to express those gifts in the study of Shakespeare then all the better. I have read of too many authors that began in direct copying of a great writer they admired. I mean word for word reproduction. After that, or as a different starting point, many great authors copied the style of a great author. They did this purposely to explore anthers voice in the discovery of their own voice, or they did this naturally and unconsciously as they produced the mountains of rejected work on the path to their own great work in their own great voice.
The other problem I find on the surface of the quote is in the ‘…do that which is assigned to you.…’ Too many of us find it too difficult to find our own calling, to find what has been assigned to us to do. I find that I do not have faith that anything has been assigned to me to do. Perhaps that is simply because I have not discovered a mission assigned to me by my Maker. Perhaps it is because I have not been assigned a particular mission by my Maker. Perhaps it is because I have been offered my Maker’s choice and missed, ignored, or refused it. Perhaps there is no Maker. I am uncertain which cause to assign to my response to this idea. It is related perhaps to my own ever present sense of being ‘in between’.
I’ll update this post with my response to the prompt in two days.
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?
I have been feeling acutely lately the reality of this quote. I have not yet become the great man of the third sentence. I cannot even say that I am on a path toward that great man status. I have a fairly week sense of self today. I have opinions that are contrary to the powerful’s opinion. Yet, Occupy Wall Street and all the Occupy Your Towns that have risen up beside it suggests my opinions are shared by others in this world.
That is surface. There is a deeper sense in which I wear the worlds opinions. It eats at me. While, at the same time, I do not know what I should be exposing of myself. Not here, not in this essay, but i have not found that personal opinion within myself.
I believe I need more silence, more time in nature. More of the solitude of the second sentence of the quote. There i may find what I need to be to become great.
My strongest belief of the moment that is not really shared by those closest to me is a fairly small thing. That small thing comes from big things. Big ideas and the war underway today between the classes. I’ve said enough for the moment. I will retreat back into solitude for a time. There I will continue to steal myself for the battles large and small ahead.
Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. The force of character is cumulative. –- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
If “the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks”, then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.
While I have the book Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I haven’t yet read it. This quote, like yesterday’s, needs context I just don’t have. I find I don’t understand genuine as the adjective modifying action here. “Genuine action”. How, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, is genuine action different from action.
“Your conformity explains nothing”, does stand on its own.
That character is the accumulation of your action makes perfect sense to me as well. So, I guess it isn’t that I don’t have context for the quote. I do. I just don’t have enough context to discover nuance here.
The subject of character has been in the subtext of American culture for two decades now, perhaps longer. Not that I think that the pundits using the term today are getting it right. I don’t think they’re getting it right.
Emerson’s quote very nearly expresses a truth I believe about character.
It is my opinion the character is external. My character is the perception that others have of me based upon my actions in the world that they have witnessed or that they have received in stories about me. My sense the man’s character is based upon what I see him doing the world, upon the words he speaks, where he speaks them, the style with which he speaks them. My sense of a man’s character is based upon what I see him do or what I see him not doing.
We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.
I do not know the context of this quote. I fear I am at a disadvantage. For today, I have no deep internal reaction to the quote on its own.
Fear, so many quotes on fear. “The only thing we have to fear…” Yet, fear is such a part of human life. We carry it, perhaps, as a means of survival. Yet, I think we too often fear, too much.
What a great and perfect person? There are none in our age, there were none in his age, there have never been any, nor will there ever be any. Yet, there are in this age, there were in his, age there always have been and always will be persons, perfect in their humanity, in their fragility, in their fear.
Set a timer for 15 minutes and tell the story must be told. There are no stories that must be told in that singular way.
All of our stories ought to be told. We need to tell them to each other everyday. It is by our stories that we share ourselves. Because our stories are our words, they are our expressions, they are our reactions, and the are our actions. Our stories are the sharing of our lives.
The sharing of our lives is a gift that we give. Yet, it is also the gifts we get. A gift that is not just in the stories others tell us, but in the telling of our own stories.
Our lives are not a singular story. Our lives are many stories. Each scene is many stories. Each is the source is the story that is upon the stage now. It is the story that we will tell of this time. It is the story that others will tell of this time. It is the story that we will remember differently another time. It is the story retold by another who only heard the story of this time. It is the story that is not about this time at all. It is the story of great or simple things.
So what is the story that must be told. It is the story that we cannot help but tell. That we are telling. That we will continue to tell. That will be told when were gone. That is told before we arrived.