Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
— Ira Glass (via nefffy)
When we study the behavior of the people who have the power of love within them, we can catalogue how they behave in various situations, and out of this catalogue formulate some rules.
One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal love is that they are apt (not always so, but very often) to play it rather cool on sexual love.
The reason for this is, generally speaking, unknown to preachers. But, it is because an erotic relationship with the external world operates so far as their concern between that world and every single nerve ending. Their whole organism, in all it’s aspects, (physical, psychological, and spiritual) is an erogenous zone.
Therefore, their flow of love is not specialized so exclusively in the genital system as it is with most other people. Especially in a culture such as ours, where for so many centuries, that particular expression of erotic love has been so marvelously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable kind of love that there is. And so we have, as a result of 2,000 years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn’t always the right place for it.
— Alan Watts
