Botina

A man who calls himself spiritual but won't fight for his beliefs will watch his children kneel to degenerates

The age of smart is over. what's coming belongs to people who can still cry, people whose hands shake before they do something honest, people who walk out of rooms midsentence because their body told them to, people who kneel down to God. people who pray without words, people who touch trees, people who know when to go home. the smart ones will call this regression, they'll write essays about it, how dangerous it is, how primitive it is, and meanwhile their marriages are dry, their kids are strangers, their bodies are betraying them with insomnia. they feel the door closing and they look for the key inside the same room that locked them in. seeing was never their gift, and now the bill is due

Find your obsession. Choose something worth dying for. Ignore everything else. Become monomaniacal. Sleep when you're dead. Eat when you must. Think about it constantly. Dream about it nightly. Wake up thinking about it. Sacrifice relationships for it. Lose friends over it. Let people call you crazy. Let them call you unbalanced. Good. Balance is for the weak. Mediocrity is for the many. Greatness demands sacrifice. Obsession is the price. Pay it gladly. Ignore the voices telling you to be reasonable. Reasonable men change nothing. Obsessed men change everything. Van Gogh was obsessed. Da Vinci was obsessed. They called them mad. History calls them genius. Find what makes you forget to eat. Pursue it relentlessly. Let it hollow you out. Let it fill you back up. Become the thing you chase. Merge with your mission. Disappear into your work. Emerge transformed. Or don't emerge at all. Better to burn out obsessed than fade away balanced. The world needs your madness. Give it everything

Everything around me is rotting, so i build. that is it, that is the whole reason. God built six days and rested one. he could have stopped at function, he could have given us eyes that only see useful things, but he made color. he made sunsets. he made the shape of a woman's back. he made the sound of rain hitting a dirt road at night. beauty was not an afterthought, it was the first thought, everything else came after. i build because the world is falling apart, and a man who does not build is just watching a fire. i lay bricks straight, i put flowers where nobody will see them, i sand wood until the grain is smooth enough to hold without a glove. these are prayers. and the man who says beauty does not matter has never built anything, he has only consumed, and consumption leaves you hollow. everyone i know who only takes has the same eyes, empty, always hungry, looking for the next thing to swallow. hold a hammer instead. hold wood. hold stone. make something that does not need you to survive, and then walk away from it, and feel what that is. that is the closest i have ever got to being alive, and i am not giving it back.

God gives you talents not so you can bury them in humility but so you can compound them into weapons against the dark