My life belongs to the whole community
Hello, friends!
A brief newsletter today, as I'm behind on several projects and generally a little scattered right now.
Felicia shared something with me last week that I want to share with you here. It's not new, and maybe you've seen it before, but it was new to me, and that's good enough!
Jeff Goldblum appeared on Steven Colbert's Late Show a few years back and, in the midst of a conversation about our country's fraught political currents, shared a bit of a poem by George Bernard Shaw.
Asked what kept him inspired, Goldblum said he returned often to this quote from Shaw. If you're unable to watch the video link above, he's quoting Shaw's poem "A Splendid Torch":
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
From what I can tell, the poem was written around 1907. It always rocks me a bit to realize that people from our past struggled with the same things we still struggle with today, including our expectation that the world somehow owes us something.
It's always useful to remember that it does not. But I like that Shaw takes it a step further, suggesting that the inverse is our true purpose: To owe something to the world, and to do that something the best we can.
How small we all really are. How heartening to remember it.
✏️Until next time,
Jg