“It doesn’t matter what you do,” I will tell my children, “as long as you’re the best at it.”
I wish someone had bred that into me.
I wish someone had repeated it over and over, setting a hook deep in my gut to drag me forward from cradle to grave, a hook more unrelenting and irreversible than any inferiority complex or Asperger’s syndrome.
Friends and family wouldn’t matter. Romantic love, either. I could forget fun, and health, and adventure. Morality would go out the window, too, unless, I had a shot at being the most moral person.
My entire life would be music, or writing, or exercise. No, even more specific than that. My entire life would be concert snare drum performance. Hiking in the Olympic Mountains. Critical interpretation of seventeenth century Polish poetry.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you’re the best at it.”
I admire that line in the same way I’m jealous of orphans.
No tethers.