Emerson on Consistency and Living

I had a similar thought recently. We're so hell bent on figuring out "who we are" and "who we want to be", that we forget as humans we're fluid. Our interests, hobbies, actions everything. You can be invested in a hobby at some point of your life and then shift gears, lose interest in that hobby and be allowed to move on to another hobby. There's no need to box ourselves in. Change is inevitable. Might as well get used to it

"Pre-established identity is the enemy of authenticity" - Me

Consistency can be a good thing, but it can also lead to monotony. Life needs a healthy balance between constant movement and routine. Too much or too little; and life either becomes too chaotic or dull.

RC :a writer Also RC : Art is not my main thing

Stop defining yourself by nouns (writer, designer). Use verbs. Don’t let these labels define you.

I've always been someone who regularly jumped between hobbies and interests. Up until a year ago I thought it was a bad thing, and that focusing my attention and energy on one hobby would be more beneficial. But now I also think that being a polymath is more beneficial for success and peace of mind. I always liked writing and I recently got into programming. Now I am planning on creating a platform online to publish short stories and interact with other writers. I've also always been into music and my love for literature makes it easier for me to write song lyrics.

I’m a doctor but I think I let that get in the way & totally lost sight of my childhood creative abilities. So glad to be exploring them again! Thanks for this video!

And here I am trying to defend against people putting a specific label on me, I am not the person I was yesterday and I won't be the same person tomorrow, I want to change. I want to go on a adventure of change while preserve things about me I treasure. My identity isn't just writing, my identity isn't just a word, I want my identity to be ever changing. To let me be influenced by life. So it was comforting to know I wasn't alone in not wanting to be labeled and stuck in one decided persona. To anyone who stumble upon this- please don't shackle yourself, no matter how much you change, your worth won't decrease and letting yourself change is the only way you can learn

That’s partly why I love grad school vs undergrad, because I have the space to pursue all my different interests. I major in viola and teach viola, but also TA for music theory, am a research assistant for African-American spirituals, and am researching K-pop for my first masters paper.

I draw a lot in my life, and i became this "artist" person, but I almost forgot about my passion for piano, that i dropped due to not having enough time for drawing, studying and playing piano at the same time. I was "consistante" person who draws nearly everyday. Recently, I listened to Bach's "Fugue in g minor "little" BWV 578" and my inside passion for music sparked again, and I continued playing everyday. I think having versatile personality helps finding hidden or forgotten passions in you. Also good inspiration helps a lot. So, listen to Bach and good luck exploring your true authenticity :D R.C. Waldun, thank you for new great videos. Love from Kazakhstan :)

I've struggled a ton with moving away from an "academics first" mindset, and I'm hoping to be away from that struggle now that I've finally finished university. It's up to the point where if I'm not pushing the needle in something I find interesting, I feel I'm wasting the day - which by itself isn't a bad thing! However, now that the structure of schooling is gone, I've tried to create some of that structure in my day to day and it's ultimately leading towards me being a sadder person (e.g. AHHH I didn't do this math thing I told myself I would do, feelsbadman type of vibes). Thanks for this wake up call! I'll struggle to live intentionally instead of hiding under thinly veiled "challenges" and "structure".

As soon as you started talking it reminded me of an excerpt from Nabokov's Lolita: "I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen «King Lear», never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. (…) Whatever evolution this or that character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus, X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer no to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen."

i would say that a lot of my skills that i have today came from practicing things for a little while, while i was interested in it (like editing, cinematography, writing etc...) then moving onto something else. these days i find that a lot of these skills are invaluable to what i spend my time doing now. my interest in philosophy, which seems at first entirely unrelated to the content i make, is actually the basis of what my current youtube channel is - though it is based on my hobbies. and this whole thing can only come into video form because of what i know and have learned about editing, cinematography, writing... etc. it's something that i dont think i would be able to even consider attempting if i didn't at least have this base knowledge already from simply learning the things that interested me in the past. i really agree that, as you mentioned, the combination of these things help support branching out into new avenues and finding that the combination of skills (rather than the consistency of simply one thing) is the key to creating that which feels really fulfilling in life.

So many times I've heard youtubers say "I was obsessed with this as a kid!" And thought "I wish I had something like that. I've never really felt passionate about anything." Until recently, more and more, I realize that I was always trying to find the perfect words to use when writing a story or about my experiences. It dawned on me that literally EVERYONE has something like this. It might not be obvious at first, but if you let yourselve reconcile with your childself, not be so jealous of the time you spent goofing off, you'll begin to see patterns in the small things you did.

my main interest is music: i play piano, and i've been recently getting into improvisation which is a fun break from just reading other people's music! since i also like performing, i've decided to start reading some books on acting to see if they can help me become better at showcasing emotion.

I've been taking an intro course on edX, The Path to Happiness: What Chinese Philosophy Teaches us about the Good Life and I see an interesting parallel. At the very beginning, Puett speaks of Confucius. He notes the difference between habits and customs, and rituals. The first two are done relatively mindlessly. You say hello, please, and thank you. You fall in cycles, ruts: the bad side of consistency. On the other side of consistency are rituals. They require you to sense the world around you and determine the best course of action. No label, no rut, no habit, no fooling repetitions and obsessions. There is still an amount of consistency as rituals repeat themselves, but consistency then becomes an opportunity for growth. There is flexibility in the sense that when you sense the situation calls for some other behavior, you take the better course, by keeping an awareness.

Drawing , piano, baking, sculpting and photography

All I can say is that life is a vibrant thing. It's colorful. We need a sprinkle of suprise, and bits of new things for the sake of adding color to our selves.

I needed some validation like this. It's hard to remember that I may not be the top of any field, but I am plenty proficient in multiple fields. The guilt over "not being the best" at something is really hard to win against.

I'm going through a personal branding design and creation process at the moment and this was something that hit me today too, about really exploring different mediums of story. I love writing, and when you look outside of that to also tell a story through visual and digital mixed media it just adds this incredible potential and reality of seeing multiple perspectives of one thing. That's really exciting and only amplifies writing. I'm learning a lot about storytelling through design and UX design. Our brains learn in stories.