Monday, December 20, 2004

Trust Yourself

I've always done things a little differently. I keep waiting until I grow up and learn "how to do things right". I'm starting to realize maybe I already have, but my "how to do things right" just looks a little different then everyone said it would.

I see others in my generation coming to the same realization. I wonder, does this happen to every generation? We live in the fracture zone between innovation and tradition. We're making it up as we go along, and for all I know that's all anyone has ever done.

posted by Ian Gilman at 1:24 AM

Comments

I also like to think I do things differently, yet at every turn I find that uniqueness is ubiquitous, and am thus often chagrined by the process of attempting individuality. And in retrospect, most of those epiphanies where I thought I suddenly understood my personal definition of "right", were largely just expressions of the "anti-Not". As in, "I will NOT do [x] this way again!" I wonder if self-definition via a double-negative really creates a definition.

To me, self-reliance comes in the awareness that "how to do things right" is but an opinion at a given point in time that will, in future hindsight, have been a great place from which to evolve the concept of "how to do things right". Opinions are entirely mutable, so any realizations derived from them are inherently prone to reconsideration.

Thus, in my opinion, "how to do things right" is really more about the fact that we cannot hold ourselves in high esteem unless we perceive the actions of our present as superior to, or evolved from, the actions of our yesterdays. If we perceive "it" to have been better than the last time, we have learned "how to do things right".

....perhaps....
posted by Blogger Synthaetica at 7:08 PM 
At 35, I still find myself looking around for the "right" way I'm supposed to do something. But I find all the best things in my life occured when I had no clue how I was supposed to do something and I did it anyway.
posted by Blogger Kirsten at 5:22 PM 
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