“Several delusions weaken the writer’s resolve to throw away work. If he has read his pages too often, those pages will have a necessary quality, the ring of the inevitable, like poetry known by heart” – The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
Likewise, several things keep us from moving on in life.
Familiarity.
Comfort.
The effort it took for us to get where we are.
But sometimes things must be thrown out and we must begin again, no matter how familiar our current circumstances, no matter how comfortable the situation, no matter how hard we worked. We must look at our lives objectively, in a vacuum so to speak, and remove the years of toil spent. Otherwise we will be like the young photographer in the following story:
“Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Ever year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: “You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?” The young photographer said, ‘Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.'”
Sometimes things must be thrown out, no matter the hard work that went into them. Sometimes we must start over, no matter the circuitous route we took to get where we’ve gotten.
