I am a collector of quotations. When I find a beautifully crafted sentence about life and how to live it, I copy it into a journal I keep just for the purpose of storing all the wise statements I find.
Before I put pen to paper, the quotations I copy must meet the qualifications of being well-written and applicable to my life. But most of all, they must be truths.
With those as my qualifications, I refuse to copy some of the most common sayings I see today on everything from posters to T-shirts to jewelry.
Thus, I have never copied into my book that most popular sappy saying, “Follow your dreams.” It implies that if you dream something for your life, you should pursue it and you will therefore have it.
In my younger life, I dreamed of being a cowgirl, a rocker babe with the Rolling Stone, and the beloved girlfriend of the Mexican gang member I sat next to in my junior high art class. Despite hours spent dreaming hard of success and glory in those areas, none of those dreams came to pass for me.
Dreaming didn’t give me the horse that I needed to be a cowgirl or the herd of cattle required to make a living of cowgirling or the money to take cowgirl lessons. My dream of riding the range didn’t convince my parents to move to the American plains where there were ranges to ride. It’s hard to be a cowgirl in urban Pasadena, California.
Dreaming didn’t turn me into a Rocker Babe either. I didn’t know how to get started rocking, and the actual rocker babes I met wore garish makeup, had tattoos in all the wrong places and were scary looking.
Though my Mexican gang member dreamboat was super cute and exciting and I dreamed hard of myself perched on a motorcycle behind him as we swept through a dangerous section of LA on our Harley hog, he already had a girlfriend perched back there. She wore garish makeup, had tattoos in all the wrong places, and was really scary looking.
I’m very glad I didn’t “follow my dreams” back then. They weren’t realistic, and achieving them would have made me very unhappy later.
Another popular saying out there is “Follow your bliss,” which means that you should only pursue what makes you really happy and forget all the goals that don’t make you giggle. Well, turtle cheesecake makes me really happy, giggly even. Until I get on the scale. All those morbidly obese people on TV’s My 600-Pound Life followed their bliss through tons of fast food and turtle cheesecake to a life spent in a bed, hooked to an oxygen tank. Following your bliss can lead you to where you have nothing to giggle about.
For a successful life, you usually have to follow what makes you miserable for awhile: staying in school and doing the work until you learn something, working at a hard job until you conquer it, changing dirty diapers, sticking with a marriage when it isn’t what the romance novels promised you. In the end you may find that your “bliss” comes from doing the right thing rather than the immediately gratifying thing.
The Nike slogan “Just Do It” from years ago was a good one and the motivation that got me started in a gym. It told me not to worry about how I would look as a “newby,” what I’d wear, or whether I’d know what to do in a gym— just start. So I did. That was 27 years ago, and the exercise I’ve gotten is still improving my life.
But the quotation that won’t go into my quote book is Nike’s more recent ad slogan from former quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He looks into the camera with sincerity, having lost his NFL career for kneeling during the National Anthem, and advises us to “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
The slogan had a great ring to it. Millennials fell all over it. This is the generation that thinks just believing anything is good. It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are really sincere about it, Dude.
They also love the idea of a sacrifice, as long as they don’t have to make it. Kaepernick “sacrificed” a football career that would have ended way before now anyway for a lucrative sponsorship deal with Nike.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter to him or Nike that Colin’s statement doesn’t make moral sense.
Millions died because Hitler “believed in something” sincerely— his right to kill people and rule the world.
Shamsud-Dim Jabbar, the Islamic terrorist who drove a pickup into a crowd in New Orleans on January 1, sincerely believed that he was honoring his god when he ruined all those lives of “infidels” that day.
Every school shooter has a sincere belief that he has a right to kill students and teachers for imagined wrongs. Some of the shooters even “sacrifice everything” by killing themselves too. I guess that shows they were really sincere ... so the murders were all right?
The makers of all the jewelry and T-shirts with these faulty slogans and the companies that push them won’t find their slogans in my quote book, and they’ll just have to do without my money. And I’m really sincere about the stand I’m taking here.
