On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to hold myself accountable. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for June 30th
Don’t Follow Your Dreams
Everyone is telling you to follow your dreams. They say you should do something you’re passionate about. You can do anything you put your mind to. If you love what you do, you won’t work a day in your life.
In a perfect world, you’d be able to follow your dreams. This is far from being an ideal world. This world is a hot mess.
You shouldn’t try to follow your dreams. You’ll be wasting your time. This world needs garbage collectors, insurance underwriters (little did I know that 5 years later I’d be working in insurance), and servers. There are already enough books, albums, paintings, and other passionate things out there that will just be better than whatever you can come up with.
You won’t know what the fuck you are doing.
You’ve never tried it before, so why start unless you can be perfect right away? You may have thought, “Maybe I can be a painter?” You have never painted in your miserable life. You don’t know how to make a canvas, mix paint, and whatever else that real artists know, but you don’t.
It’s expensive to take a class, and if you ask someone how to start, you’ll be admitting you don’t know something.
You will fuck it up.
Even if you start trying something you are passionate about, you will fuck it up. You’ll just be making mistake after mistake. You don’t know how to do what you are doing.
It’s adorable that you started doing something. It’s so cute that you’re learning something new. It’s too bad that you will never do that thing as well as others. Let’s be honest, you’ll do this new thing for a week or two and then give up.
You’ll have to stick to it for a long time to get any good at it.
You won’t just be good at something without spending a considerable amount of time doing it consistently. This is after several years of doing it poorly. You’ll likely experience several years of decline before you start to see any improvement.
You will suck. You will hate yourself and think you are a piece of shit before you will start to feel ok with your improvements. Why put yourself through that? Why not stick to things you are naturally good at, or adjust your goals to align with your current actions?
You would already have known if the gods had gifted you the talent, so why do something to be terrible or at best, mediocre at?
It won’t be worth it.
Perhaps you will finally paint a painting that resembles the mountain lake you had been envisioning. Now what? That painting won’t be worth anything. You will be sad and lonely because you have been learning to paint fucking landscapes instead of socializing because of you are passionate means you don’t have any time for an everydaylife.
So there you are with a painting of a mountain lake that might look similar, but not as good as a Bob Ross painting. Your life is still meaningless and shallow, and now you are closer to the day you die alone.
You weren’t born to do this.
If you look at the biography of all the famous artists, musicians, and authors, they didn’t have to grow up worrying about their next meal or whether they would pay rent. Well-to-do families supported them. The successful starving artist is a myth; they often come from upper-middle-class and affluent families, and many of them are from families already in the industry.
So, if you don’t have the privilege to be an artist, then it will just be a hobby. You’ll want to keep your day job so you don’t die.
Good luck.
Prayer
Ptah,
You gave birth to creativity,
You directed the building of Memphis.
Now we can’t design these buildings anymore,
We now have to work inside the buildings.
Not to create,
But to survive,
Creation can only be done by the gods,
and the ones chosen by the gods,
And the rest of us have to try to keep our heads above water
Let us have the power to create again
Gift us with passion
So that there is a reason to get out of bed,
Amen
Craft
Don’t even try.
Goal
You may want to adjust your goals to align with your actions. Only the lucky few get to follow their passions.