Today is the first day of the rest of your life, what will you do with it?
In the beginning...
That’s the question that awakened the writer within me last summer. In that first post, I raised the idea that you should stay in the moment and love your life now. It’s too easy for people to think: my life would be so much better if I had a job or my life will be exactly what I want as soon as I find a great woman.
Of course, this is not a novel idea, people have been talking about it, probably for about as long as people have been talking. I recently read the classic novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the take home message is that you can easily ruin your life by mindlessly pursuing goals. Clearly, people are aware of the dangers of obsessing about the future and not doing things you love in the day to day.
Knowing it is one thing, but living that life is a completely different plane.
My perspective has come a long way since that first post. I don’t know if it’s much different, but it’s certainly come a long way. I’ve written about 80 posts, read about 40 or 50 books, and spent countless nights sitting in the dark thinking about life. Sidenote – this was my favorite post Thank you running, and my favorite book was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Both are my favorites for the same reason – they bleed emotion, and that’s what good writing should do, it should be infectious with soul.
This is why I love artists. I don’t particularly love art. I can’t remember the last time I went to an art museum, and I probably couldn’t tell you the difference between Mozart and Van Go. That said, to pursue something off the beaten track, it takes a whole lot of resolve to say, no I’m not going to follow the track set out for me by society. Instead, I’m going to carve out my own path, and work way harder than other people have to, so that I can live my dream out, every day.
I spent the other day filming a Justice Conference promo with two inspiring artists, Nate and Jarod. I’ve never filmed anything, so it was a novel experience to work with them, and to see into the eyes of film-makers. They had day jobs, but they also spent their weekends making films, trying to launch a career in film making. I would consider myself to be a hard working person, but if I work a ten hour day, I’m probably complaining about it all night. Here were these guys, waking up at 6 AM on a Saturday, shooting all day, wracking their minds to figure out how to reach people through their art, scavenging the Mt. Hood trails to find that perfect one second shot of me running between some trees.
As I saw into their day and heard their stories a little bit, I saw more. I remembered, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life, what will you do with it?” Seeing Nate and Jarod that day, I saw two guys who were really alive, and on fire for their dreams. More, they weren’t preparing to live their dreams, they were living their dreams, that day. They spent the day creating their artistic vision into reality, so they could communicate a small message of hope to the world.
As for myself, I feel like I need re-evaluate my life a little bit. When I spent the day with Nate and Jarod, I left inspired, knowing that someone out there was living the dream, but where did that leave my own life? If someone spent a Saturday with me, would they leave inspired, knowing that someone out there was living the dream?
So, today is the first day of the rest of your life. What will you do with it?
from ken
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