Mary Chapin Carpenter - Here I am
Another incredibly beautiful song. This is from her pandemic "Songs from home" series. Song starts at 1 minute, but -- dog!
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| Saguaro after the blooms - "hats" of fruits. (Click for larger) |
Below is a section from Losing My Religions; however, this Key & Peele sketch says it all.
Passion,
love, and/or dedication are not enough.
When you
commit yourself entirely to the pursuit of something, that produces excellence,
and that is intoxicating for people who want to be close to excellence.
–Jane Friedman, The Business of Being a Writer
Sorry, Jane, this is simply not true.
Same for Steve Jobs’
(in)famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford:
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They
somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
Blargle.
OK, fine, you got
me – this is probably not horrible advice for graduates of
Stanford. They not only have a Stanford degree, but to even get in, they
must have had both a privileged life with connections in addition to their
vastly above-average talents.
But for the vast
majority of the tens of millions of people who watched the speech
on YouTube, following “your heart and intuition” is a path to disappointment
and/or your mother’s basement. For
every Steve Jobs or Serena Williams or David Sedaris or RBG there are countless – Hundreds? Thousands? – of
people who passionately dedicated themselves to something and failed.
Yet this shit advice
is so common. It feels like everyone who succeeds thinks it is just
because they wanted it more. Fish-man Michael
Phelps was on Colbert saying anyone can be anything they want.
Sorry, but no one without once-in-a-generation physical skills will ever
out-swim Phelps. And there was no way he could have then
turned himself into a Tiger-beating golfer, or a Nobel- winning physicist, or a
brilliant and insightful memoirist.
My life is a testament to
this. In seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, I lived basketball.
I ran, I lifted, I practiced before and after school. But as soon as other
kids got close to my height, I wasn’t even good enough to play for a
shitty school with a graduating class of 69.
And my passion to change the
world, to reduce suffering? This book is testament to that failure as well.
I did meet my soulmate, but as is clear in this book, that was a lucky, unlikely accident, not as the result of passion or dedication.
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