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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Inspirational
- Subject: Faith / Hope
- Published: 06/20/2014
LOOKING BEYOND THE CLICHE - My Credo
Born 1969, M, from Herten, NRW, GermanyLet's talk about stereotypes.
I'm only saying this because I see that so many people categorize themselves or think they have to be something that they're actually not. The difficult thing is, of course, that nobody speaks of the separatism that is a real threat to our global community. So I am sending this message out into the world, a message that is truly and genuinely me, one I want to have written on my gravestone one day. This man was unique. He was not a cliché.
The most impressive people in the world have been people and are and always will be people who dare to dream unique dreams, walking roads of peace rarely tread by others. Life is unique. You are unique. Communicate with others. They are unique, too. Union and perfect peace lies in the adoration of versatility. I know my parents were always slightly agitated over people who didn't understand what it meant to be an artist. Their work as elderly artists were the finishing touches to glorious careers. The old couples in their neighborhood thought my father was doing his TV commercials just for fun. The old women asked my mom what she was cooking, knitting or baking at the moment. When she answered that she was not baking, cooking or knitting anything, but preparing for concerts and still teaching voice, they looked at her as if she was an alien from outer space. Even I was the proverbial dartboard for strange and rather annoying comments. Because my dad and I always had our portable cassette players with us when we were out and about and listened to music via our earphones we got some strange looks. One bank lady asked me what music we always were listening to, which implied that both of us were always listening to the same thing. She should have known that was impossible. But of course it was hard to know something you are a stranger to. Back in the 1990's it maybe was not as common to run around with earphones as it is today.
Fact of the matter is that she thought we were weird. But you know what? Weird is the new cool. Weird is unique. If you are seen as weird, you are probably doing stuff other people don't understand. As long as what you are doing is beneficial to everyone, being a little strange is not such a bad thing. The thing is that most people think that they only have two roads to travel: forwards or backwards, up or down, left or right. In fact, there are a million different roads.
A lot of people seem to think (and I won't pretend that I haven't felt or am fooled to feel that way on occasion) that only a road to absolute super stardom is a life worth living. But that is like wanting the chicken before you get the egg. Quality is the main goal here. If you want to go far you have to stick with it and never ever put all your money on one horse. What is more important is that creativity and creation in general are qualities and valuable traits in their own right.
Socrates taught himself a new melody on the flute ten minutes before he died just because he wanted to know how to play it. That is the attitude we have to adopt if we are to succeed in anything, even if it only means hanging up your own art on your own livingroom wall. Take me, for instance. I can say that my basic talents as a painter are minimal. I took a course as a child, was taught to love art. In fact, I love anything artistic. In the three years I have been painting I have learned so much about mixing colors and emulating shapes and sizes and putting them on paper. Most of it is technique. We are not talking Rubens or Manet here, but the point is that the craft as such is learnable. Deciding to do it and then taking the first step, that's the hard part. The rest is easy.
Anyone can paint? Sure. What the result will be, well, that's up to you and how hard you work at it. Seeking alternatives is sometimes the road to glory. I'll give you an example. We'll invent a guy called Joe. Joe is a banker. He starts out early in life with the aim of one day becoming the CEO of a bank, any bank. He gathers lots of experience and there are times he thinks it's going up, but somehow he never gets the big break to work with the big boys. But Joe makes the mistake of concentrating too much on his workplace and not his profession. In fact, he mixes up the two. He wants to move up, he just doesn't know how. After all, he is entering his own middle age. So he starts trying to impress his superiors by becoming one of the top ten. What doesn't occur to him is that he actually can look for another bank to work in. He keeps telling himself that nobody will hire him because he is too old. But because Joe is afraid he doesn't even try to look for another job. And he won't make it his own bank because they already have a preconceived conception of him as a person who is dependant on them. But Joe has a Master's Degree in Economics. He could work as an accountant or apply to teach Economics. He is even an excellent chess player and a good guitarist. There have been people who have asked him if he would want to join a band. Joe has many possible options to live out his creative urges and actually feel satisfaction. The last thing he should do is try to impress his boss if the boss does not give him something back. He could, of course, keep pushing the limit and become more and more frustrated, watch soccer and drink beer and spend his life becoming the cliché of being a failure. The problem is that he doesn't know there are other options.
Career or just personal fulfillment?That's up to him. The point is that if he is frustrated, he should do something about it. You don't need to impress a superior that keeps you stuck in an abusive relationship. Then you would be succumbing to a cliché and become something that he, the boss, wants you to be and you know you are not. Something that probably has nothing to do with who Joe is. That would damage his spiritual development. There are always other possibilities that benefit everyone that offer the necessary fulfillment. You don't need to become the cynical, frustrated beer-guzzling, sport-watching coward too afraid to take the decisive step towards a better life.
Career and family? It works. You just have to know how. Here below are a few examples of people who battled frustration, refusing to become stereotypes, achieving goals many would not have believed possible so late in life. Grandma Moses lived a quiet rural life until she decided to start painting at age 78. Her art is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. A friend of ours received her Master's Degree in Art History at the University of Vienna - at the age of 70. A singing student of my mother's was also 70 when she received her Master's Degree as a Church Organist at the Music Academy in Gothenburg in Sweden. Alan Rickman got his first break as a world famous actor at age 46. Mae West was 43. F. Murray Abraham was 45. I could go on and on. The point is not even to achieve great fame and fortune. If that happens it is great. The point is to do good work that fulfills you. Do anything that fulfills you and brings you and your family happiness.
The other cliché has to do with a human characteristic that I would want to call "fingerpointing". Life is always better on the other side of the fence. Or worse. Or the people on the other side of the fence are stupid or lazy or abusive or too rich or too poor or too loud or too strange. That, of course, gives people something to talk about. It is destructive, though. The people on the other side of that fence can't hear you. You can. The only thing who gets hurt is you. If you jump over the fence and kill the bastard you both get hurt, probably for good.
Fingerpointing is the reason for every single war and battle and difficulty in history. It is always based on a misunderstanding. The crisis could always be avoided. German Jews fought as decorated national heroes in the First World War only to be executed in the death camps in Ausschwitz during the Second World War. The U.S. Government sold their weapons to Iraq during the 1980's only to fight them in the 1990's and be killed by their own guns. We all know the problem. I don't need to tell you, dear smart reader about how wonderful the world can be, WILL BE, when we finally see each other as we are and not what we want each other to be. We say nationalities don't matter. They do. But only because they're a part of the unique personality of everyone you meet. Creed, color, upbringing, origin, beliefs, taste, experiences, likes, dislikes, skills, profession and spiritual conviction: all those things matter because we can learn from each other.
That we have differences is obvious and important. We can love each other more because of how different we are. Bottom line, guys, is that youth, vitality, creativity, hope, love and inspiration are things that never end. These characteristics are ageless. If you fill yourself with these feelings you will grow old wisely and love doing so. Clichés and stereotypes exist not only in how we wrongly judge others and create an outer image of ourselves. These clichés also thrive within what we think it is to be famous. Some people are born into fame. Some people are born wealthy. But most people were normal day-to-day individuals that worked extremely hard in order to achieve their goals. But they were born into obscurity. Per Gessle from the Swedish rockband Roxette said that when you become a so-called celebrity you don't change. Everyone else does. Because they think you have changed. I have known famous people that stood in a corner completely alone because no one dared to speak to them. "What am I supposed to say to a famous guy?" Well, so what? He's famous. He's still a person and I can relate to him as a person. When Madonna lived in Hell's Kitchen back in the 80's nobody even noticed her. She became famous and - BAM! - the whole world started revolving around her. But she was still a person. Bill Gates still gets up in the morning and brushes his teeth, goes to the bathroom, flips on his PC and reads the morning news. The Queen of England still fights with her husband Philip now and then about something he should've done but didn't. And Antonio Banderas had to cancel last day's shooting because he woke up with the flu.
We are all human. That celebrities are more extraordinary or more unique than us or don't have the problems we have is a cliché and, as I said, clichés are not real. Most of them aren't, anyway. I can only quote Jesus, one of the many very wise people that walked this Earth: "Love one another! Love your neighbor as yourself!"
I hope you understood that last bit. That means that loving yourself is a necessity. Loving yourself means that you can love others. A house cannot stand without a foundation. Love is the foundation. It always has been. It always will be. And remember always to try to understand any individual on a personal level, not as a stereotype of origin or if she is wearing a scarf over her head or he is wearing a kilt.
If you catch yourself wanting to succumb to a stereotype, learn a new instrument, look at the clouds or give someone a compliment. If you would like hearing it, so would they. Famous or not, we are all basically human. Life is unique and so are you.
LOOKING BEYOND THE CLICHE - My Credo(Charles E.J. Moulton)
Let's talk about stereotypes.
I'm only saying this because I see that so many people categorize themselves or think they have to be something that they're actually not. The difficult thing is, of course, that nobody speaks of the separatism that is a real threat to our global community. So I am sending this message out into the world, a message that is truly and genuinely me, one I want to have written on my gravestone one day. This man was unique. He was not a cliché.
The most impressive people in the world have been people and are and always will be people who dare to dream unique dreams, walking roads of peace rarely tread by others. Life is unique. You are unique. Communicate with others. They are unique, too. Union and perfect peace lies in the adoration of versatility. I know my parents were always slightly agitated over people who didn't understand what it meant to be an artist. Their work as elderly artists were the finishing touches to glorious careers. The old couples in their neighborhood thought my father was doing his TV commercials just for fun. The old women asked my mom what she was cooking, knitting or baking at the moment. When she answered that she was not baking, cooking or knitting anything, but preparing for concerts and still teaching voice, they looked at her as if she was an alien from outer space. Even I was the proverbial dartboard for strange and rather annoying comments. Because my dad and I always had our portable cassette players with us when we were out and about and listened to music via our earphones we got some strange looks. One bank lady asked me what music we always were listening to, which implied that both of us were always listening to the same thing. She should have known that was impossible. But of course it was hard to know something you are a stranger to. Back in the 1990's it maybe was not as common to run around with earphones as it is today.
Fact of the matter is that she thought we were weird. But you know what? Weird is the new cool. Weird is unique. If you are seen as weird, you are probably doing stuff other people don't understand. As long as what you are doing is beneficial to everyone, being a little strange is not such a bad thing. The thing is that most people think that they only have two roads to travel: forwards or backwards, up or down, left or right. In fact, there are a million different roads.
A lot of people seem to think (and I won't pretend that I haven't felt or am fooled to feel that way on occasion) that only a road to absolute super stardom is a life worth living. But that is like wanting the chicken before you get the egg. Quality is the main goal here. If you want to go far you have to stick with it and never ever put all your money on one horse. What is more important is that creativity and creation in general are qualities and valuable traits in their own right.
Socrates taught himself a new melody on the flute ten minutes before he died just because he wanted to know how to play it. That is the attitude we have to adopt if we are to succeed in anything, even if it only means hanging up your own art on your own livingroom wall. Take me, for instance. I can say that my basic talents as a painter are minimal. I took a course as a child, was taught to love art. In fact, I love anything artistic. In the three years I have been painting I have learned so much about mixing colors and emulating shapes and sizes and putting them on paper. Most of it is technique. We are not talking Rubens or Manet here, but the point is that the craft as such is learnable. Deciding to do it and then taking the first step, that's the hard part. The rest is easy.
Anyone can paint? Sure. What the result will be, well, that's up to you and how hard you work at it. Seeking alternatives is sometimes the road to glory. I'll give you an example. We'll invent a guy called Joe. Joe is a banker. He starts out early in life with the aim of one day becoming the CEO of a bank, any bank. He gathers lots of experience and there are times he thinks it's going up, but somehow he never gets the big break to work with the big boys. But Joe makes the mistake of concentrating too much on his workplace and not his profession. In fact, he mixes up the two. He wants to move up, he just doesn't know how. After all, he is entering his own middle age. So he starts trying to impress his superiors by becoming one of the top ten. What doesn't occur to him is that he actually can look for another bank to work in. He keeps telling himself that nobody will hire him because he is too old. But because Joe is afraid he doesn't even try to look for another job. And he won't make it his own bank because they already have a preconceived conception of him as a person who is dependant on them. But Joe has a Master's Degree in Economics. He could work as an accountant or apply to teach Economics. He is even an excellent chess player and a good guitarist. There have been people who have asked him if he would want to join a band. Joe has many possible options to live out his creative urges and actually feel satisfaction. The last thing he should do is try to impress his boss if the boss does not give him something back. He could, of course, keep pushing the limit and become more and more frustrated, watch soccer and drink beer and spend his life becoming the cliché of being a failure. The problem is that he doesn't know there are other options.
Career or just personal fulfillment?That's up to him. The point is that if he is frustrated, he should do something about it. You don't need to impress a superior that keeps you stuck in an abusive relationship. Then you would be succumbing to a cliché and become something that he, the boss, wants you to be and you know you are not. Something that probably has nothing to do with who Joe is. That would damage his spiritual development. There are always other possibilities that benefit everyone that offer the necessary fulfillment. You don't need to become the cynical, frustrated beer-guzzling, sport-watching coward too afraid to take the decisive step towards a better life.
Career and family? It works. You just have to know how. Here below are a few examples of people who battled frustration, refusing to become stereotypes, achieving goals many would not have believed possible so late in life. Grandma Moses lived a quiet rural life until she decided to start painting at age 78. Her art is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. A friend of ours received her Master's Degree in Art History at the University of Vienna - at the age of 70. A singing student of my mother's was also 70 when she received her Master's Degree as a Church Organist at the Music Academy in Gothenburg in Sweden. Alan Rickman got his first break as a world famous actor at age 46. Mae West was 43. F. Murray Abraham was 45. I could go on and on. The point is not even to achieve great fame and fortune. If that happens it is great. The point is to do good work that fulfills you. Do anything that fulfills you and brings you and your family happiness.
The other cliché has to do with a human characteristic that I would want to call "fingerpointing". Life is always better on the other side of the fence. Or worse. Or the people on the other side of the fence are stupid or lazy or abusive or too rich or too poor or too loud or too strange. That, of course, gives people something to talk about. It is destructive, though. The people on the other side of that fence can't hear you. You can. The only thing who gets hurt is you. If you jump over the fence and kill the bastard you both get hurt, probably for good.
Fingerpointing is the reason for every single war and battle and difficulty in history. It is always based on a misunderstanding. The crisis could always be avoided. German Jews fought as decorated national heroes in the First World War only to be executed in the death camps in Ausschwitz during the Second World War. The U.S. Government sold their weapons to Iraq during the 1980's only to fight them in the 1990's and be killed by their own guns. We all know the problem. I don't need to tell you, dear smart reader about how wonderful the world can be, WILL BE, when we finally see each other as we are and not what we want each other to be. We say nationalities don't matter. They do. But only because they're a part of the unique personality of everyone you meet. Creed, color, upbringing, origin, beliefs, taste, experiences, likes, dislikes, skills, profession and spiritual conviction: all those things matter because we can learn from each other.
That we have differences is obvious and important. We can love each other more because of how different we are. Bottom line, guys, is that youth, vitality, creativity, hope, love and inspiration are things that never end. These characteristics are ageless. If you fill yourself with these feelings you will grow old wisely and love doing so. Clichés and stereotypes exist not only in how we wrongly judge others and create an outer image of ourselves. These clichés also thrive within what we think it is to be famous. Some people are born into fame. Some people are born wealthy. But most people were normal day-to-day individuals that worked extremely hard in order to achieve their goals. But they were born into obscurity. Per Gessle from the Swedish rockband Roxette said that when you become a so-called celebrity you don't change. Everyone else does. Because they think you have changed. I have known famous people that stood in a corner completely alone because no one dared to speak to them. "What am I supposed to say to a famous guy?" Well, so what? He's famous. He's still a person and I can relate to him as a person. When Madonna lived in Hell's Kitchen back in the 80's nobody even noticed her. She became famous and - BAM! - the whole world started revolving around her. But she was still a person. Bill Gates still gets up in the morning and brushes his teeth, goes to the bathroom, flips on his PC and reads the morning news. The Queen of England still fights with her husband Philip now and then about something he should've done but didn't. And Antonio Banderas had to cancel last day's shooting because he woke up with the flu.
We are all human. That celebrities are more extraordinary or more unique than us or don't have the problems we have is a cliché and, as I said, clichés are not real. Most of them aren't, anyway. I can only quote Jesus, one of the many very wise people that walked this Earth: "Love one another! Love your neighbor as yourself!"
I hope you understood that last bit. That means that loving yourself is a necessity. Loving yourself means that you can love others. A house cannot stand without a foundation. Love is the foundation. It always has been. It always will be. And remember always to try to understand any individual on a personal level, not as a stereotype of origin or if she is wearing a scarf over her head or he is wearing a kilt.
If you catch yourself wanting to succumb to a stereotype, learn a new instrument, look at the clouds or give someone a compliment. If you would like hearing it, so would they. Famous or not, we are all basically human. Life is unique and so are you.
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