first hand desire.

"Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation"- Charlotte Bronte.

We are living second hand lives. I want to stop writing about other peoples experiences, and other peoples ideals, I want to stop painting other peoples pictures. I don’t want my work to be inspired by other’s I want it to inspired by nothing other than what’s real. What I have experienced first hand. I can’t write about love until I have experienced it. I can’t paint the Eiffel tower until I have seen it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be real; it would just be second hand research, second hand ideas.
It’s like we talk about saving the world, saving the hungry people in Africa, because that’s what we have been taught to work towards. We have never seen those hungry people ourselves, in order to compel our natural instinct of sacrifice. We condemn war, even though we have never been negatively impacted by it, or impacted by it at all. We condemn it because we have gained the views of other’s on why war is bad. These aren’t instinctive things, we don’t just know how to react to it, we are taught to know how to react. We know the difference between love on TV and in real life, because we have seen both. We can compare, even though we might have not experienced it ourselves, we have at least two realities to compare it with.
But these realities aren’t our own, they are someone else’s lives. We perceive, and we analyze those perceptions to create our own, without any form of first hand contact with the experience itself. Our feelings, emotions, and arguments are based on the reality of others.
Stop waiting to be inspired by somebody else’s words, living up to someone else’s expectations or descriptions of how things are supposed to be. Stop using quotes. Stop critiquing books, write your own. Don’t listen to Buddha on what the seven deadly sins were, if they are relevant to your life you will learn them anyway. Don’t be a hypocrite. Do as you please, smile like you feel.
Experience the world first hand, and then talk about your own reality.

Don't take pictures when you haven't experienced anything worth documenting.