In kindergarten you see the inspirational posters “if you can dream it you can do it.” my kindergarten self thought that was pretty smart stuff. 

my twenty three year old self would modify it slightly: 

“if you can dream it, provided you can get over the pus pod of a hill that is sloth and general not-doing, if you can get over your fears, just get over yourself for a moment or two, enough to write something that is good or true or beautiful, or barring that, just something honest, if you can hang onto the sketches in the back of your mind that seem too good to actually be birthed into reality, if you can fight the gravity of other people’s expectations, if you can swallow your failure in a huge gulp of air that burn the bottom of your lungs and still dive back down again, if you can keep moving, always moving, and still remember the still point, if you can focus and fight the tunnel vision and learn to see, really see the way a bee flaps its wings a hundred dozen thousand billion times too fast for you to count, the way it simply slips an inch or two closer to your face as if to taunt you, if you can turn off the phone and the computer and sit with yourself and the idea all in the same two dimensional blank crisp white page that is your dream, if you can move from there, then, then you can do it.”