A Thousand Words

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This is not a story. This is different.

Have you ever glided? I mean really, truly, glided? I have. No. I am not an acrobat and no, I've never been anywhere near the sky. But I can glide. Or at least, two parts of me can.

A) my fingers. And B) my heart.

Go up to a piano. Go ahead. Now brush your fingers against the keys. Did you smile? Or was it just another experience for you to lock away? That's the question you have to ask yourself every time you experience something new. Did your heart seem to glide through the entire world before returning back to your body, or did it stay in place the whole time? Most people don't understand what I mean at all. It's really quite simple for me.

When I first brushed my fingers against a piano, my heart lifted out of my body and spun around the entire world before coming back to its home. You have to wonder to yourself what force could possibly allow that to happen. I didn't understand what had happened for days until I realized that this was fate. And it was telling me my calling. And trust me, your calling does not mean your talent. I was horrible at the piano until about twelve years in. Then, something clicked. I wasn't fighting it anymore. I was gliding. My fingers were able to glide above the keys, only touching them with the softest of taps, and my heart soared further than ever before.

Now they call me the pianist. They don't call me by name. Just the pianist. Because I'm no ordinary pianist. this is different. I actually feel it, because this is my calling.

Do you know what your calling is? Most likely, the answer is no. There's a difference between a calling and a job or work. A lot of the time, you won't be able to do your calling as your job. Other times, it may be the only job you allow yourself to have. A calling has nothing to do with money or talent, or anything of the sort. It simply has to do with a few things. Your heart learning to glide, and finally slipping into the slot that was empty until now: your place in the world.

Most people don't understand that.

I've met people who have felt their heart glide, but dismissed it as something silly that is not meant for them. They became very rich, yes. Almost all of the people who are rich are the people who denied their calling. look at the TV, the media, and you're looking at thousands of people who threw their calling away. Either they denied it completely, or they exploited it for money. I can't really tell you which is worse, they're both horrid crimes in my eye.

I've met other people who fought for their calling beyond all obstacles. They experienced their heart gliding away from them and returning home, and they ran to tell everybody else, only to be laughed at. A lot of parents don't understand how important a child's calling is to them. A child who finds their calling is hundreds of times more powerful than an adult who finds it. For a child, their calling is their very being. They simply cannot do anything else in their life or they will be forced to end it.

It's a rare case that a child finds a calling, instead of waiting until adulthood. That's why so much of today's society is unhappy. They didn't find their calling until it was too late. But for a child,a pure innocent child, nothing is more powerful. I can tell you that. I found my calling when I was ten years old. That's an incredibly young age. And yet, sometimes I still wish I found it when I was younger. I've never met anybody who found their calling any younger than six or seven. The last person to do that was Mozart.

So you see my point.

And so I ask you again: have you ever glided? Did you keep at it, or throw it away? Are you unhappy? Are you rich? Does money matter to you? Do you have a family? And then another: do these questions mean anything to you at all? If so, is it because you simply don't care in general, or because you don't care what I think? Yes, there's quite a difference. A profound difference, one that can't be described in words accurately, I'm afraid.

If you've never glided, then you haven't tried enough. Go to the pet shop and pick a puppy up. You may be surprised. Yes, puppies can be callings. Cats can be callings. ANYTHING can be a calling. Pick up a bunch of brochures for different countries and see if one does anything to you. Go down to the music store and play around with everything. Even better, buy some symphony CDs. Listen carefully. If one of them sticks out among all the others and makes you fell completely different from the others, that may be your calling. You can't know for sure until you actually touch one, but there's a good chance it will be.

I am running out of room on this piece of paper. It's my last piece so I must be quick. It'll probably fall apart anyways, but I woke up this morning and nothing felt right. And then I picked up my notebook and everything felt right again. And so I started writing. It turned out a lot longer than I thought. But it doesn't matter if I run out in the middle of it. What matters is that those who read this get something out of it. It doesn't have to be something big, I'm not trying to change people's lives. But something. A small flicker of hope.

I'm writing this for the hopeless. For the hurt a helpless. For the rich, the poor, the weird, and the rejected. It doesn't matter who you are. I want you to realize that. No matter what people label you as, all that matters is that you-