Ok, I’ll be up front. I’m in the middle of a two-week tour of Europe after spending a semester in England, I’m sitting in a hotel in Paris, I just spend 8 hours at the Louvre, and I’m about to sing the praises of a TV show. Here it is:
Lalalala lala la lala
I just had some time to kill in my hotel room so I picked up my laptop and watched
a few episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60. I laughed, I c…well, I didn’t cry, but I felt emotional responses that I think are appropriate for a TV show. The most important thing is that I thought. I thought about our country and about relationships, about politics, about people, about culture, about religion. I love this show.
I’ve had a lot of very new experiences in the last four months. I’ve learned a lot of things, I’ve seen a lot of really amazing things. I have by no means processed everything, but one thing keeps coming to mind as the most important. It’s this idea of humanity – about us as a people and where we’re going. It’s a big concept, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. What will our legacy be? What will we change? What will we make better or worse?
More to the point: What will I change? More and more I see things that I don’t think are right and along side them I see things that are amazing or just downright wonderful and I feel this growing responsibility to create something for the wonderful category.
So what will that be? I’ll be thinking on this one.
Go do something that makes you think – that stretches you. Read TIME’s person of the year issue this year. Read about their Teddy Awards. Read this quotation which I’ve loved for many years:
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
-Teddy Roosevelt
