I try not to use too many four letter words on this blog, but I read this quote earlier today that I think you all need to read: “Once in a while, blow your own damn mind.”
I’ve been circling around this very idea for um, I don’t know, years? It’s the concept that keeps us chugging along when we’re tired at two a.m. but also humming with the buzz of a character’s actions taking shape in our Word document or sweating over a week-long DIY project in the hot summer sun.
Nothing particularly awful would happen if we didn’t push a little harder. We might wake up tomorrow feeling a little less awesome, but for that second it wouldn’t feel catastrophic.
I’ve seen seven movies in 2013 already (not all of them in their entirety but the majority). And though they’ve all been different, their storylines spanning hundreds of years of human existence, the same quite beautiful message keeps popping from one to the next:
This life? It’s going to be up for you when it’s down for someone else. Your actions won’t always make other people feel like rock stars. You might—OK, definitely will—lose people who you cannot fathom losing: whether it’s their life, their time or their respect.
And even if you’ve got it all figured out, whatever that means, somebody you know is suffering something unbearable.
And when you realize that, it’s pretty darn hard to wake up and feel like you deserve goodness in your life. Because if your best friend smashes in her car or your husband gets fired or your sister gets pushed around, you want to fix it.
Sometimes we can, but sometimes we can’t.
That’s what all seven of those movies taught me this week: that sometimes, you can’t feel bad about how your life looks right now but damn it if you don’t try and do something to blow your own mind.
I think that’s what 2013 is about: this notion that we cannot control the universe but we can control ourselves and if we want something—for our own or our friends and family or strangers halfway around the world—we better do something mind blowing to make it happen, because nobody, and I mean nobody, is coming to hand us hope and happiness on a silver platter with a shiny, polished lid. It just ain’t happening this year.
What I’m really dying to know is this: what are you doing to blow your own mind? What are the people around you doing?
If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m madly in love with cool projects started by hardworking and passion-driven individuals, and I never ever get sick of hearing about them. So please, enlighten me (and the rest of the readers) and share it. Whether it’s you or your best friend or a stranger whose YouTube channel you stumbled across six years ago, I’m interested. And I know others are as well.