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Follow Your Enthusiasms
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How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god,’ so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. That’s been my advice to young people who ask me, ‘What shall I do?’ I taught once in a boys’ prep school. That’s the moment for young boys — or it used to be; I don’t know what’s going on now — when they had to decide their life courses. You know, where are they going? And they’re caught with excitement. This one wants to study art, this one poetry, this one anthropology. But dad says study law; that’s where the money is.
OK, that’s the decision. And you know what my answer would be — where your enthusiasm is. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.
~ Joseph Campbell
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What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future…
