If you don’t evolve, you die. The vultures and buzzards and all the other carrion birds will come to pick off the remains. It’s a simple rule, really, easy to learn, easy to live by. Evolve. Change. Transform. Do or die. Do, or be eaten, swallowed whole, by the adaptable ones.
Change the website. Change the writing. Take a class. Learn a new skill. Strengthen an existing one. Do something, anything, but most importantly, do. Do or do not. There is no try. in this world. It’s do or do not. It’s do or die.
Do: not rut-bound; experimental, the stylistic branching out. Even if it fails, it constitutes a form of growth…A pioneer, working close to the cutting edge of innovation, attempting the original, the untried. (Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones)
Don’t be afraid. Doing is not so much beating of the air. It has aim; it is steady, like a pulse. Let it throb like the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, “The Third Letter”)
Again: do not be afraid. Have courage. Embrace the struggle to grow because, in the embracing, you will do. You will evolve. There will be no carrion birds circling you; you’re already gone.
Image: Larry Smith (Creative Commons)