Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
Interpretation
Letting go and exploring new experiences are essential to avoid stagnation in life.
This quote emphasizes the necessity of saying goodbye to familiar comforts in order to embrace new opportunities and experiences. It warns that clinging to what we love without seeking growth and change can lead to a gradual decline of the self, ultimately resulting in a loss of vitality and purpose.
In practice
During a graduation speech, to encourage students to embrace change as they step into the future.
I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artistβ¦..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.
The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.
In the name of what - except perhaps the coefficient of rarity - does man adorn himself with necklaces of shells and not spider's webs, with fox fur and not fox innards? In the name of what I don't know. Don't dirt, trash and filth, which are man's companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him and isn't it serving him well to remind him of their beauty?
Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.
Poverty devastates families, communities and nations. It causes instability and political unrest and fuels conflict.
I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
Rwanda has emerged from the devastation of genocide and become more secure and prosperous than anyone had a right to expect.
And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.
It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.
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