The best advice I've ever received: A Let's Blog Off post
Every weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with some thing known as a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event in which bloggers of each stripe weigh in at the identical subject matter on the same day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What's the great advice you've got ever received?"
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The best advice I've ever received came from Stephen Sondheim. Actually, Sondheim didn't deliver it personally. Rather, someone suggested that I pick up a copy of Sondheim's 1984 triumph, Sunday in the Park with George.
Sunday in the Park with George, like all of Sondheim's work, is deep and complicated. If you're looking for something light and uplifting, a Sondheim musical probably isn't for you. Sunday in the Park tells a fictionalized story of Georges Seurat, the French pointillist. Specifically, it tells a fictionalized story of his life as he set out to paint Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Portions of the play take place within the painting itself.
Act moves the action in advance a hundred years to the 12 months 1984. Georges Seurat's extremely good-grandson, George, is likewise an artist who stocks the tortured soul of his famous ancestor. In act two comes the music "Move on." Here's a recording from a London Concert closing 12 months. The singers are Daniel Evans and Jenna Russel who starred in a revival of the play in London in 2005 and alternatively on Broadway in 2008.
The great advice I've ever been given is in that song. Stop annoying in which you are going, circulate on. Let me repeat that. Stop annoying wherein you're going, circulate on.
When I first heard that song, I become a neurotic 31-yr-old who spent extra time 2nd guessing himself than he did being efficient or carving out a few sort of happiness. I turned into unhappy and I could not determine out why. The first time I heard that lyric it hit me like a Mack truck that I wasn't glad because I wasn't letting myself be.
I was so afraid to make the wrong move that I ended up not going anywhere. So I sat and wrote down all of the "bad" things in my life. I used to blame that stuff for my unease, but as I wrote I started to see that the common thread in all of those situations was me. Once I had that aha moment there was no going back.
I'm hardly ever perfect and I backslide all the time, much like absolutely everyone else. But thanks to a track in a play most humans have never heard of, I see my life differently than I did when I turned into that neurotic 31-year-antique. I am a satisfied man and I were given that manner due to the fact I decided to be a happy guy.
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As the day goes on, the rest of the participants in today's Blog Off will appear miraculously at the end of this post. Keep checking back and check out everybody's postss. You can follow along in Twitter as well, just look for the hashtag #LetsBlogOff. If you'd like more information about about the Blog Off or if you'd like to see the results of previous Blog Offs, you can find the main website here .