no need to give up

Where there's a will, there's a way

When I was around twenty, I was invited over to my friend's place where she homestayed for just over a year.  The hostparents were a young couple with two little kids.  They -- especially the father -- didn't hide his strong interest in me when we met.  Knowing where I went to school and hearing my English (my friend was American), he seemed to see me as an ideal daughter he wished his own daughter to grow up to be like.  When I said I wanted to become a fiction writer, he said it was もったいない meaning "You would be wasting your talents."  It gave me a brief shock, because at that time, I was almost willing to give up everything else if I could support myself as a professional writer.  It never occured to me that I would be wasting something -- losing other opportunities -- to spend my life (not necessarily my whole life but even part of it) on writing.  During the following years, I thought I started seeing what he meant.

While studying to become a doctor can be sometimes tedious, I never feel like I'm wasting my time.  If I only help one patient after I become a doctor, that probably wouldn't matter.  I studied all this time, just for him.  Writing and other artistic jobs, on the other hand, can be more difficult to measure their value.  I still sometimes wonder if I'm just wasting my time when I practice my guitar for more than two hours.  There's a limit to what you can do in a lifetime.  Since you never know if you're going to be good enough, you might as well give up on art altogether unless that's all you can do, just like the father implied.  Really?

I came across an inspiring interview today with Ryu Goto, a classical violinist who was known as a prodigy.  Does he still play the violin because that's his only choice?  No.  He holds a Harvard degree as well as a black belt in karate.  He tells us all that it's okay to be (overly) ambitious.  You don't have to choose one thing and stick only to that (you can listen to the interview here though it's unfortunately in Japanese):

今の時代の我々は、夢を一つもギブアップしなくていい。ちゃんとプランニングをすると、後回しにしないといけないこともあるけれど、ギブアップはしなくていいんだと思う。夢はいろいろあって、どれ一つとしてあきらめたくなかったので、一つ一つこなしていくことにした。０．０１％でも前進していればいつかは夢にたどり着く。死ぬまでに夢を成し遂げることができるのかと疑問に思うこともあったけれど、今のテクノロジーの進歩を考えたら、まぁいいやと思った。夢は僕にとっては夢ではない。夢はいつか起きること。ただ起きるだけ。100％起きる。夢を信じきっているので、何があってもそれはすべて夢への過程。全体像を見ると、すべては肥やしになっている。何があっても前に進んでいる。＜中略＞意志さえあれば方法はあると考えて、時間はかかってもあきらめなくてもいいわけだから、とにかくいつかはそれが完成するので、それまで毎日ただ少しずつ頑張るだけ。

"A dream, to me, is not a dream.  It's something that happens.  No matter how long it takes -- some things you might have to put on the back burner for a long time -- but as long as you take one step at a time, it's eventually going to happen.  You don't have to give up."