Have you ever spent even a single day, in isolation, waiting for the outside world to come to you and brighten your day? Hoping that things will get better, but expecting it to come entirely from forces outside of yourself?
Artists are often accused of working too much in isolation, creating art without ever presenting it to an audience. How many fantastic songs have been written, but we’ve never had the chance to hear them?
This goes beyond songwriting, however, beyond creating something for an audience. This applies to how we often live our lives – spending today hoping for a better tomorrow, waiting for our fortune to be improved by the influence of someone else. True, in this age of curated online personas and open, anonymous flagellation from unseen serial haters, it is understandable that we might feel overly influenced (and overly oppressed) by the world around us. But maybe it’s more than that – maybe we go to work each day to a job we hate. Maybe we are neglecting to take care of our health. Maybe we’re buying a weekly lottery ticket, pinning our hopes to a million-to-one shot.
There’s only one way to be sure our tomorrow is a better day than today, and that’s to take a step forward toward that future; to decide what it is that will make tomorrow a better day, and apply ourselves toward making it happen. Even if we make the tiniest amount of progress, we will still be making things happen for ourselves. And if we find ourselves in a “one step forward, two steps back” situation, at least we summoned the courage to try, and hopefully gained a little wisdom to boot.
There’s a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” If we want to spend our days waiting for the outside world to come to us, then we might as well place ourselves in a time capsule and hope to be stumbled upon at some future date, because that waiting is like being frozen in time – it’s a near-guarantee that we’ll remain right where we are today, while the clock keeps ticking. And time is something that, once it’s spent, we can never get back.
If you like what you read above, maybe you'd like to work with Allister at Tilted White Shed? Reach out through the Contact Us page.