There is an old story about an old man and his son taking a
mule into the market to be sold. At
first the son sits on the animal and the father walks beside him, but when they
hear some ladies talking about how selfish it was for the son to make his
elderly father walk, they decide to switch places. However, it wasn’t long after that that they
hear a group of men saying that the father shouldn’t be riding as the son
walks. They then decide that they will
both ride. Unfortunately, the combined weight
proves to be too much and as they cross a bridge, all three of them topple into
the water. The father decides that you
can’t please everyone, you can just please yourself.
I think too often we bend over backwards trying to live up
to other people’s expectations. We try
to conform to whatever “they” say we need to do, or think, or behave. I can’t help wondering, who made “them” such
an expert anyway?
Sometimes at the shop I’ll have customers ask me about the
“right” way of doing something: the right way to sew, the right way to quilt,
the right way to bind, etc. Usually
questions like this come from someone who is just learning to quilt. The more you quilt, the more you realize it
isn’t a question of the right way or the wrong way. There are many ways to sew, quilt, or bind a
quilt. The question is, what way works
best for you, or sometimes, what works best for this particular project.
My sister, who plays the trumpet, heard once in a lecture
that too often musicians will try to play like Louis Armstrong or Miles
Davis. But the world already has a Louis
Armstrong and a Miles Davis. We don’t
need any more. What we need is for
musicians to play like themselves. They
have a quality and a talent that only they have. If they try to play like someone else, they
will deny to the world forever of they own style, because no one else can play
like they can.
In the same sense, I cannot waste my time trying to be like
someone else, even if “they” say that I should.
I have to be me, because if I don’t do it, no one else will, and I will
deny forever the world of what I and I alone can bring to it.
