love it or learn from it

A while back I pointed to the quote "Fast until you get what you want" as an idea of how I'd like to live my life.

Reading this, I realized that I might have made a mistake.

When have any of us ever known exactly what we wanted just by looking at it?
In life, as in business, the only way to know for sure whether something new will work is by TRYING it. Experience, strategy - these things just improve our PREDICTIONS as to whether we'll like something or whether it will work - the only way to know for SURE, is to try it.

By refusing to try things, by fasting until we're sure...we miss out on a lot of opportunities.
And each of those opportunities represents either joy/success we missed out on or a lesson that we didn't learn.

Now of course the difficulty is that there are an infinite number of things to try at any given moment - how do we know where to start?
THIS is where the lessons we've learned come in - they allow us to limit ourselves intelligently.

So don't fast - get out there.
But in doing so, be fearless, and accept that with all the good, there will be some bad.
Which is great - you'll either love it or learn from it.

quietly

Quietly

Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet –
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and the penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

- Kenneth Rexroth

the american pursuit

Read this.

Most days, this is exactly how I feel, and I suspect, this is how I'm going to turn out.

I've struggled a lot with the idea because I notice that I'm constantly resisting (or at least, if not resisting, then ensuring that I'm HYPER aware of) the American go-getter way of life, and I find it important to continue reminding myself: There is no destination. There is no ladder. There is nowhere we're all going and no one who's going to get there sooner rather than later. If I "fail", it's ok.

The reason is that I don't want to be caught up mindlessly following a culture that tells me what should make me happy. The problem is, that what he describes...IS what seems to make me happy. And it would be a terrible mistake to reject something just for the sake of rejecting it, rather than considering it against my own true wishes.

So for guys like us, it's not that we're caught up and struggling in an endless pursuit that we don't and never will understand. It's that the pursuit itself is what brings us joy. What's of course more difficult to know is whether the REASON we enjoy the pursuit in the first place is because the culture we're 'not allowing ourselves to be caught up in'.

At this point though - it's too late. I love it, and I'm okay with it.

from blossoms

The poet that got me into poetry:

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

- Li-Young Lee

companies are people too

I've noticed that people tend to treat companies as faceless, nameless entities that are made to be taken advantage of. A great example is the apparently common NYC practice of 'stealing movies' by paying for one movie at a theater, and then sneaking into another (sorry, I'm calling you out). People justify this by saying "Well, New York movies are too expensive!" Seriously? If they're too expensive, don't pay for the product.

Perhaps it's because I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, but I can't help thinking of companies in the exact same way that I think of individuals.

I (hopefully) wouldn't:
- steal from an individual
- make a mess for an individual to clean up
- take advantage of an individual when their back is turned


Perhaps one way to make this a more directly impacting action is to consider the fact that though it may be more indirect, every time we take advantage of a company, we end up hurting some of the individuals within it (e.g., someone gets fired for not policing the errant movie-goers more properly). I think of the guy owning the company as the guy getting screwed. And I think of the employees as the ones who have to put up with the customer's nonsense.

It's funny how easy it is sometimes to make excuses to ourselves for our less than admirable actions.