OK. I’m putting off the He-Man/4-non-blondes music video off one more week to share with you this incredible speech that Elizabeth Gilbert, writer of the best seller “Eat, Pray, Love”, recently gave.
The best part of this speech is how she ties it all together in the end, so I’m afraid you’re going to have to invest the entire 20 minutes to watch.
This clip discusses one of the fundamental questions an artist asks himself: “Is my greatest work behind me?” It deals with the feelings and difficulty we feel when, creatively, we just aren’t in the zone, and also attempts to explain how to tame the creative ‘genius’ within us all (aka tell those dang voices in our heads to be quiet).
Many thanks to Tai for sharing this with me.
“The hard part comes for the dancer at 11am the next morning when he wakes up and discovers that it’s Tuesday at 11am and he’s no longer a glimpse of God, he’s just an aging mortal with really bad knees… and maybe he’s never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe no one will chant God’s name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life?
“This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life.
“But maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you, but maybe if you just believed they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when your finished to somebody else.”