In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice.\u00a0 Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond \u2013 and his response is magnificent: \u201cDear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusts:<\/p>\n
I thank you for your friendly letters.\u00a0 You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years.\u00a0 I don\u2019t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.\u00a0 What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what\u2019s inside you, to make your soul grow.<\/p>\n
Seriously!\u00a0 I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives.\u00a0 Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her.\u00a0 Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on.\u00a0 Make a face in your mashed potatoes.\u00a0 Pretend you\u2019re Count Dracula.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don\u2019t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed.\u00a0 No fair tennis without a net.\u00a0 Make it as good as you possibly can.\u00a0 But don\u2019t tell anybody what you\u2019re doing.\u00a0 Don\u2019t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, of Ms. Lockwood.\u00a0 OK?\u00a0 Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticles.\u00a0 You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem.\u00a0 You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what\u2019s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.<\/p>\n
God bless you all!
\nKurt Vonnegut<\/p>\n
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When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig.\u00a0 I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of \u201cgetting to know you\u201d questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What\u2019s your favorite subject? \u00a0And I told him, no I don\u2019t pay any sports.\u00a0 I do theater, I\u2019m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.<\/p>\n
And he went WOW.\u00a0 That\u2019s amazing!\u00a0 And I said, \u201cOh no, but I\u2019m not any good an ANY of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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: \u201cI don\u2019t think being good at things is the point of doing them.\u00a0 I think you\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that honestly changed my life.\u00a0 Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn\u2019t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them.\u00a0 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 \u201cWin\u201d at them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice.\u00a0 Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond \u2013 and his response is magnificent: \u201cDear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusts: I thank you for your friendly letters.\u00a0 You … Continue reading sage advice from Kurt Vonnegut<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":593,"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sd41blogs.ca\/denroches\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}