“I am sorry if I am discouraging you with all my would-be good advice. But if you’re like me you’ll do as you want to do anyhow. I always do as I want, preferring to kill myself in my own way rather than die of boredom trying to live according to somebody else’s “good advice.” Besides adventure is two-thrids uncertainty. Had I been sure about Paris, I wouldn’t have been nearly as thrilled as I was when I came here with eight dollars, and wondered how Fortune would let me live. But I’m a ‘nut.’ You needn’t be one. It’s better to stay home.”
— Langston Hughes in a letter to Harold Jackman, May, 1924
from Selected Letters of Langston Hughes
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If you can’t get with two-thirds uncertainty, stay home! (Adopting this as a mantra…)
I know? I think it’s a good rule of thumb. Trying to be better at not planning it all out, going with ye olde flow …
That’s what I miss about youth — being able to live with two-thrids uncertainty. And when gravity was not the enemy ; )