I'm only alive when I'm moving.
The faster I move, the more alive I am.
I am most alive when I am dancing.
And lately, I have been DANCING.
The past month, I've been dancing through life. Everything has been going really well, for the most part, and I've learned that saying yes keeps you growing, opening yourself up to new, sometimes frightening experiences. Prioritizing is key: if you take on ten million tasks in no particular order of importance, the Jenga pieces all come crashing down in a depressed, scattered mess.
Regardless, say YES.
Say YES to life. Say YES to risks. Ready, set, go! and go and go and go!
Where I differ from the old cliches is on the point of "Never look back." I disagree. Look back; reflect; learn. If you never look back at where you're coming from, how will you know where you want to go?
I've learned to be a better writer with this strategy, too. Full commitment to writing whatever is on my mind; diving in, and saying YES to my own thoughts as I translate them to paper. Then, LOOKING BACK. Editing and finding the most important thoughts (eliminating the "fluff," as an old English teacher once called it).
Intellectualizing is the absolute enemy to art, to life, and to being present at any given moment. I sink when I'm alone, thinking. My room can be a cave of cloudy thoughts, burying me in their immense weight. Depressing as shit. It's not until I get out of my room and DO something that I can snap out of it. Artists have a disgusting habit of intellectualizing life. Life is not something to observe from the sidelines and use as a subject for a research paper. You can't duplicate life if you've never lived. What you get is a taupe, bland, oatmeal kind of product. I decided, I don't want to live an oatmeal life. I love oatmeal. It's incredibly healthy, agreeably textured, filling, and cheap. But oatmeal is not one of life's great treasures. Eating oatmeal is not an experience. And oatmeal will not be a priority in my life.
Anyway....how did I get on a tangent about oatmeal?
