Assignment 19 - Kelden Andrews

I really like quotes, I have a board of them in my room tacked up with different stuff from 18th century English poets to 20th century Japanese nationalists and everything in between, I'm writing a bunch of these blogs all at once and I just finished the bucket list blog post so I've been thinking about life. So this quote is going be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for life.

"Live the lifestyle instead of paying lip service to the lifestyle. Live with commitment. With emotional content. Live whatever life you choose honestly. Give up this renaissance man, dilettante [naughty word] of doing a lot of different things (and none of them very well by real standards). Get to the guts of one thing; accept, without casuistry, the responsability of making a choice."

This quote is by a writer I really enjoy and admire, Mark Twight. He's a phenomenal essay writer with most of his writing from his time as a climber being in his book "Kiss or Kill" I have this book and have re-read at least 3 times since finding it last year. He was a pro climber for many years and put up some of the hardest routes the world over, and now is a gym trainer for the stars, films like man of steel and 300 had him as the head trainer. Anyway the frankness of this quote really got to me. It's not nice or civil but it's true, you need to live life with commitment, you need to focus your efforts instead of spreading out like some oddly shaped human pancake. It's made me focus more on the things I love and less on the stuff I was "paying lip service" to. It's made me dive head first into writing and climbing and being content with that. The severity of it also made me realize that we really truly only have a finite time on earth and any time wasted is gone forever. It's really just made me a more driven person.

Kiss or Kill was compiled from his essays many years after publishing with a little explanation for each. The quote this one comes from was titled "Twitching with Twight" and he admits several years later he was mostly venting about how dissatisfied he was with his own life as a photographer at the time. He admits he was overdoing it to be bombastic and I agree but I also think the sentiments are valuable and shouldn't be ignored lightly.