Nothing is Wasted

Someone very smart assured me recently that nothing is wasted. Okay, they didn’t exactly tell me personally, I seem to recall it was Oprah on her podcast. Oprah, or whoever it was, said something along the lines of ‘each experience brings something to our lives from which we can learn, grow’. Even if that is just to learn to avoid that particular thing in future.

This one little piece of information made me so happy. Now I can feel like I have not wasted the last 20 years of my life studying in a field that I didn’t enjoy, working jobs that made me feel horrible, watching too many reruns of Sex and the City. The series not the god-awful movies. I can see now that I was learning all this time, I just didn’t know it at the time. Now I just have to journal the shit out of this and find meaning and lessons.

I am going to have to disagree with Oprah (or whoever) though. Just a little.

I did waste time. I wasted time listening to the never ending loop of self-loathing in my head. I wasted time believing the story that came from god-knows-where that my creative work wasn’t up to snuff, that I was okay, but just didn’t quite have what it took to ‘make it’. (Make it? Where?) And I wasted time on people who really didn’t deserve my time and energy. I wasted time not making because I was scared of what people would think.

James Morgan wrote once that failure as an artist comes not from failing to sell our work, but in failing to create it in the first place. I couldn’t agree more. So now, I create, anything, I just do it, sing, dance, paint, cook. Before it’s too late, because time is of the essence and there’s not a moment more to waste.