I saw this story from Kurt Vonnegut the other day and it perked a smile on my face. It's one of those things I not only want to remind myself of (often), but I hope my grandkids grow up knowing (and pretty much everyone).
This is the story from KV:
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
“And he went wow. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’
“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’
“And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.”
I like that. It's not that we should do things that make us miserable. The point is simply learning to enjoy the things we do, rather than worrying so much how we compare to others in doing them.
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"This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us." - 1 John 5:14
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