Letting go is hard – although it gets easier with practice.
Today it’s time to let go of my blog. Let go of why I created it in the first place. Time to release expectations for myself and others.
Ten years ago today I launched Living The Emerson Rule. It appeals to my sense of symmetry to say goodbye now.
My sentiment behind The Emerson Rule remains unchanged. Thank you for the time you spent here with me over the years. The journey continues elsewhere.
THE EMERSON RULE:
I said it – believed it – acted on it with passion . . . doesn’t mean it’s true today.
With new information comes new understanding. I’m free to redefine what I think and who I am. I accept the risk of being misunderstood.
Conceived while reflecting on this passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance:
“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them…
… A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”