I recently heard this poem again from Rilke. This part really connects for me:
"Let everything happen to you,
beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final."
Rainer Maria Rilke
There are so many new tools for social media - it seems like I can barely learn one and the next one comes along. Its overwhelming! Invites come for yet another social network..... what might I be missing?
I stopped writing blog posts for most of a month, with various excuses, some valid and some not. It was just hard to know where to begin.
Many years ago when I was at music school, I was a 'natural' player. I could play just about anything and it all came so easily. The challenge came when there was something really difficult and I had to develop discipline and learning skills to persist through to the other side. My horn teacher wisely pointed out that the payoff is not immediate - that results rarely come at the moment of work, but only later. Thus it is sometimes hard to be objective and trusting with delayed gratification.
I wandered off the professional horn playing path in pursuit of other ideals, and proceeded to watch a dear friend, just keep going, one foot in front of the next with unbelievable discipline until he sat in the chair of one of the top orchestras in the country, and continues to sit there today. He 'Just Kept Going.'
So what do we need to do to succeed in the online social world?
Persistence
What else?
I took this picture at one of the scarier points in a trek some years ago and sometimes working with new media can feel this way.
