Cherish

Some quotes stop you in your tracks when you read them. This one was like running into a brick wall:

"Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built."—James Allen- "As A Man Thinketh"

My favorite book is "As A Man Thinketh" by James Allen.

If you have yet to read it, it's thirty-odd pages, and it has the power to change your life in a big way. 

Passion drives us forward in life.

It's palpable. 

You can feel it in someone's presence when they have it. It's infectious. It can catch hold of you and shake you like a chew toy, making it impossible for you to focus on anything else in the world around you. People can have the material wonders of the world in spades and lack an ounce of passion or gratitude for them. 

I've seen some miserable-looking people driving Bentleys. 

No one inspires me because they have a "thing."

There's a mistaken notion that we covet those material goods that wealth can bring, but what we really wish we had is other's zest for life. I want to emulate someone diving into the deep end of their dreams, tearing the meat off the bone, and living with a seemingly inexhaustible store of energy. 

A nuclear reactor full of motivation. 

People who truly inspire people, the ones who cause us to jump out of our seats and cheer, are the ones who radiate their gratitude, who flood the world around them with passion for what they do. They don't need a fancy car, house, or education to do that. Conversely, a lack of passion keeps us locked into places and positions that lead us into the dreaded "Sea of Sameness," where we look, sound, and act like everyone else.

You can spot these people just as easily as their opposite. They breathe despair into the world around them and radiate frustration, contempt, and disgust from their pores. The word cherish isn't in their vocabulary because to cherish something means to give everything of yourself to it. It means you have to be grateful for it at every moment, even the shitty ones. 

"Cherish the music that stirs in your heart."

That's so powerful.

Something inside you is begging to get out.

You and only you keep suppressing it.

No one externally can suppress something stirring internally in you.

They don't have access to it! 

They can't get to it. 

They wouldn't even know where to start looking for it. 

That music, that song is clear about its intentions, but it's fully reliant on you to turn the volume up. 

Should you suppress it, you do so at your peril. 

James Allen is begging you to listen to your internal DJ.

That's why he uses one of the most powerful words in the English language.

Cherish is a word not often used anymore because you can't cherish empty plastic things. 

You can cherish an object a relative or friend gave you, but that's about the person, not the object. 

You can cherish an experience. 

You can cherish a dream. 

In the hierarchy of feel-good words, cherish is at the top of the heap. 

It stands alone at the top of the mountain. 

"Cherishing your visions and ideals." 

This warms me up like a cup of cocoa in front of a fireplace in the dead of winter, with snow falling outside the window. 

It's that gushy to me.

It's cupcake frosting from the grocery store sweet, and I dig it. 

It's saying that your dreams are the things worth holding onto. It's telling you that by loving them with a passion reserved for only the most revered things in our lives, you CAN make them a reality.

Why doesn't Allen say, "Hold onto your visions," or "pay attention to your ideals?"

Because these are weak and disposable. 

If you don't have that sickening love for your dream, the kind where you don't want to spend a minute apart from it, then you won't have the resilience to get through the suck. 

And man, there's going to be some suck. 

"If you remain true to them, your world will at last be built."

Keep pushing wherever you are today in the process.

Push past quiet desperation and weakness.

Push into gratitude for the attempt.

Push into gratitude for the process.

I'm going to keep pushing the keyboard.

Why?

Because it propels me forward like a rocket.

Because in my visions and my ideal, someone reads this who is struggling to be more in life and finds comfort in the words.

Someone who is where I was finds this and takes the first step. 

Someone picks up "As a Man Thinketh," reads it cover to cover, and is forever changed for the better. 

My vision is clear.

The world I'm building feels concrete, like there's a space in time I can almost put my finger to. 

And I will cherish it with every fiber of my being. 

EO