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.
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
One can go back toward safety or forward toward growth.
That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.
Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! 'Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of your old life and into the new!
The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc.
People try to hold onto the sameness. This holding onto prevents growth.
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