“Watch your thoughts, they become your words;

watch your words, they become your actions;

watch your actions, they become your habits;

watch your habits, they become your character;

watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

Lao Tzu

I love this quote.

It’s about being held accountable for how you conduct yourself in the world. It illustrates the potential your thoughts can have. That’s why so many of these quotes mean so much to me. They aren’t just pieces of advice. They become a mindset. They spread into your consciousness like a vine. They get tangled in it, sprout fresh, and grow. They are the seeds of accomplishment. They bear the fruit of achievement.

They are the flowers that bloom into:

“that agreeable after-glow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence.”

George Eliot

The more I read quotes like these, the more I wanted to become a writer myself. I was inspired by the way someone could arrange words in such beautiful ways. How they could articulate complex ideas and create detailed descriptions of their experiences. 

They share deep insights into what it means to be human. They share what they believe to be the truth, for themselves, and for all of us. They become the voices of their generations. Their work becomes an essence of an age.

“Confined thoughts around me, in mummy cases, embalmed in spice of words…They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.”

James Joyce

I would daydream about writing everyday, especially when work was going bad, or my life seemed to be drifting along aimlessly. I would tell myself that if I worked hard enough, I would retire early and spend the second half of my life reading and writing full time.

In spite of how often I thought about my dreams, I wasn’t actually doing anything to make them more obtainable. I wanted to be a writer, but I wasn’t even writing.

The quote from Lao Tzu says that your thoughts become your actions. I had been thinking about writing for a long time, I clearly wanted it. What gives?

Either my determination wasn’t strong enough, or my negative feelings and doubts were stronger or more frequent than my positive and encouraging thoughts.

Maybe it was something else… Pack some snacks, because the knowledge train is leaving. Destination: truth town.

If you read my last post: How Dostoevsky Can Still Help Us Understand Ourselves, you already know that uncomfortable experiences condition us to avoid certain situations.

Harmful mindsets can also come from things that are taught to you. From a young age you are told to act and behave a certain way. You are fed a belief system that awards conformity and punishes rebellion. You are raised with the conviction that you are entitled to be happy, and if you aren’t, something is wrong with you.

Society forces you to conform to your role in the world. Groups may provide you with safety and security, but they can also stifle your creativity and individuality.

In a group, the terms of your behaviour are dictated to you by others. Your thoughts become influenced by them, and you develop their preexisting ideas.

You choose the beaten path. The path of least resistance. You give up your impulse to stand out because you don’t want to be ridiculed and criticized for being different.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

A friend of mine used to play a certain computer game online when he was in high school. He played it so much that it began to negatively affect his life. He would skip school, avoid friends, and stay up all night gaming. I can’t say how else it affected his life beyond what was visible to the public. His mom did everything society expected from her, she tried to persuade him to take school seriously, and to focus on more important things. She tried punishing him, hiding his computer, yelling and screaming, nothing worked.

A few years of this went by, and he became really good at the game. He always had a natural gift for games, so after the amount of commitment and dedication he put into this one, it wasn’t surprising. He met a few friends in the chat rooms. They discussed strategy and concepts about the game. Eventually they started playing together at higher skill levels.

The internet in our town was really slow and his computer was quickly getting outdated. The game was evolving and he couldn’t keep up, so he lost touch with his friends. It would have been pointless and even laughable for him to try to convince his mom to move to the city and get a faster computer, just so he could play video games. He was forced to relinquish his grip on gaming greatness. To his family and friends, he was wasting his time anyway, throwing his life away.

One of his gaming buddies went on to win the international championship, an event that would have over $30 million dollars in prizes. The other 3 still play the game professionally.

The interesting thing about this story is that in different cultures, society has different values. All of his friends were from South Korea, where online gaming, or Esports, are much like North America’s NFL, NBA, and NHL.

Now, I’m not condoning playing video games non-stop for small chance you’ll become the next Tiger Woods of gaming. It’s just an example of the opportunity that was lost because our culture demanded my friend conform to the standards set by our society.

Fun fact! Saskatchewan produces the most NHL players per capita in Canada. I would say that’s a good indication of what our society values.

Your dreams and your goals change with society. A society that treats extravagance and wealth as the pinnacle of success, will have its people’s dreams aimed toward materialism. A society that is obsessed with romance and love, will likely have marriage and family as top priorities.

“You become what you give your attention to, if you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will”

Epictetus

The writer, Charles Bukowski, is renowned, respected and cherished today as a literary giant. Bukowski published a few short stories throughout his long career, but nothing financially sustainable or noteworthy.

He was continuously rejected by publishers. He never wavered or changed his writing style, he didn’t pander, or let rejection discourage him. He kept at it year after year. He worked at a post office, writing everyday before his shift. It wasn’t until he was in his 50’s that he started to make a name for himself.

If he didn’t have the perseverance and gall to choose to ignore what society was telling him, we might not be talking about him right now.

“(Courage is) when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what”

Harper Lee

Think about all the innovators that were mocked and laughed at for their ideas. Can you imagine if they succumbed to society’s pressures?

Walt disney was fired from a newspaper in 1919 because he lacked “imagination and had no good ideas”.

Socrates was poisoned because he was “corrupting the youth.”

Van Gogh never got any attention for his paintings while he was alive. He only sold a few of them in his lifetime.

Out of Emily Dickinson’s 1800 poems, only 10 were published while she was alive.

These are some of the things society said about the following inventions.

Airplanes: “They are of no military value”

Lightbulbs: “A conspicuous failure.”

Movies: “Talking doesn’t belong in pictures”

Automobiles: “The prices will never be sufficiently low”

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect”

Mark Twain

These are the stories you should filled your mind with. These, and the words of the individuals who understood society and it’s oppressive tendencies. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said that: “Whoso should be a man must be a nonconformist.”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s ideas were powerful enough to generate a massive cultural shift in America in the 19th century. His lectures and essays about self-reliance and individuality fostered America’s “intellectual declaration of independence” from Europe in 1837.

“High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

His philosophies have buried themselves into my mind. He, and others like him, have given me the encouragement to write and to create my own identity. They have influenced my thoughts and allowed me to create good habits, to be responsible, and to choose the hard paths.

When I think now about Lao Tzu’s quote, I realize it wasn’t my thoughts that were dictating my actions, they were society’s, filtered through me. When I thought about writing for a living, my automatic response was about money, financial independence, and fame. It was my dream but it was manufactured by society.

I have a different reason to write now, this blog has become therapeutic for me. It helps me think clearly. Most of all, I’m excited to have something to leave behind when I’m gone.

They say: “The truth is like poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry.” If most of society thinks that, I’m happy to think the opposite. I like the truth and I like poetry. I like it even more when Ralphy here makes the truth so poetic.

“It is easy in the world to live after the worlds opinions; its is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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