I think I’ve written about this before, I’m not sure. I don’t care at this moment if I have or not. I’ve recited D.H. Lawrence’s quote many times but never lived it and I can decide now to live it.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
Credit needs to be given even when you’ve taken a thought from someone else and made it your own by living through it. Even when it applies to more in your life than what the speaker intended the idea for. Zack Even-Esh is a strength coach and one of the first to open the so-called garage gyms. He has and continues to work with high school athletes. He has a podcast and I was listening to it over a year ago when I heard him say that he’d rather burn his gym to the ground than let …. He went into how he wouldn’t let the boys who trained with him not work at their hardest and expect the best of themselves and so on. It’s his personal noble undertaking and if you want to hear about it, go listen directly from him.
But I won’t get into that because that what I’ve taken and what I’ve lived out was the will of a man to truly destroy everything that he toiled endlessly to build and start completely new because it had been twisted from its original intent or maybe he found that it was too far off the mark what he learned it could possibly be, the good it could become, or the good that the man who created it knew should come from the work of his hands.
It seems almost unreasonable to ask that of anyone. You question your sanity when you think of asking it of yourself. To let completely go of an identity you’ve assumed, a craft you’ve practiced, a work you’ve dedicated yourself to. To let it die so that you can shed each layer of believed purpose until all that remains is what and who you truly are and what your greatest personal commission.
It’s something beyond courage that allows a person to do this. It’s a belief based on a glimpse of what might and could be. It’s a remembering of who you may be, a complete clarity of consciousness. It ’s words I’ve yet to learn to describe it. But who's to say I can’t light the match. And maybe I can see around me once what was before is in flames.