“In the action you will find the wisdom to carry on.”
A quote that may or may not be from famous punk vocalist.
“In the action you will find the wisdom to carry on.”
I had this in my notes as attributed to Henry Rollins, but a cursory google search didn’t turn up any direct results, so this may or may not have been spoken or written by the former punk singer turned podcaster/author.
I came across it in one of those old documents that somehow keeps making its way on to each new computer I get.
A dusty old digital box that keeps getting moved from device to device.
Like so much ephemera from our lives that we can’t seem to part with (given we have the luxury to keep old things, as many do not), those files sit on my computer, unopened for years, unnoticed except for those moments when I upgrade or go hunting for something specific.
In those moments I think to myself “I need to go through all this old crap and just get rid of it.” It is digital debris taking up space, however small.
But occasionally it yields fruit, such as this.
Maybe the idea itself isn’t so deep or particularly meaningful, but its existence sparked a thought in me.
Is that perhaps one of the reasons why we hold on to things?
To view them later with a different eye?
From the perspective of life passed, lessons learned, from a different place where we first encountered them?
When I first came across this I thought of it in a purely exercise-related sense:
Start exercising and you’ll want to keep exercising because you’ll see the benefits.
And that makes sense, I guess.
But, also, we gather reasons along the way.
Perhaps to justify the choices (and mistakes) we’ve made, but also the things we couldn’t have possibly predicted or seen from where we started.
By doing we discover the reasons why we do.
In action, we learn.