What Makes You Come Alive?
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs;
Ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive"
*A little note: apparently this quote is often attributed to the fictitious, well according to wikipedia, Harold Thurman Whitman. Whoever wrote it, it works!
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March 23rd, 2007 at 5:53 am
Hey Nat. I just looked at your blog a minute ago. It had been awhile
since I checked in and I was wondering if you’d posted anything. I had
one of those “whoa” experiences which I’ve come to associate with your
blog. Here’s the story.
Laura and I had been talking about butterflies. She was reading a book
about existentialism by Kauffman; he was quoting a poem by Goethe about a
butterfly who flies too close to a candle and is burned. Kauffman points
out that it’s moths, not butterflies, which fly near candles at night, but
that Goethe knew that. He used the image of the butterfly because the
word “psyche” can be translated as butterfly.
All this in the context of transformation or metamorphosis. So she and I
were talking about butterflies. She had sent me an email earlier in the
day and used the word butterfly.
It’s been in the air. I interviewed/visited a lab for
a possible post-PhD job. It’s an interdisciplinary lab studying the gait
of a certain kind of caterpillar … I held one of the caterpillars for
awhile, but at that moment it didn’t occur to me to think about
transformation. Ironic, as I’m personally transforming out of grad
student mode into a more professional mode.
More, too. Laura bought a book about pragmatism by Robert Unger. She
read me a part where he uses the image of a carapace to describe people
who have been “hardened” by disappointment. Like a shell or wall they
build around themselves. He talks about shedding the carapace in order to
live. I couldn’t help thinking of beetles, which have carapaces. And
then I thought of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which the main
character Samsa, who lives a boring life with his parents and works a
boring clerical type job, transforms into a beetle one night.
So all that was in the air in the conversations between Laura and me
today. Then I “randomly” stopped by your blog, and that quote and picture
were just dead on. The quote connects with some things Laura’s been
reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was very much into self reliance and
the idea that one shouldn’t follow what society seems to be dictating, but
should rather follow one’s own path (Emerson is quotable; one which stands
out is “whosever would be a man must be a noncomformist”).
I think I could go on still longer I think, but I’ll stop there. I hope
all is well and your travels are stimulating.
Anthony