Dear You,
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Franz Kafka
A year ago, we couldn’t have fathomed the reality we are living in today. As we experience a great divide in history, each of us are messengers to the future. Each of us will contribute to and shape the histories of this time. Our time.
At Serendipity, we turn to the power of words, their ability to transcend the confines of borders and generations—to connect us not just with each other, but with our own selves.
If you could send a letter to yourself, across the wide leap of time and take a moment to ponder—what would you like to say to your future self?
Join us in a collective project that seeks to preserve our evolving understandings of these times.
Join us by writing a letter addressed to your future self, which will be showcased on our digital platform and at the next edition of Serendipity Arts Festival.
Famed climber Alex Honnold has shared the advice he'd give to his younger self in a note penned to himself as an 18-year-old.
Dear Alex,
Right now, you're an 18-year-old loner, lost in a sea of uncaring faces at UC Berkeley. You'll spend most of your freshman year, not at class, but at a local boulder, traversing the rock face back and forth with headphones in. You prefer it to the climbing gym because you don't have to talk to anyone. Surprisingly, this is the beginning of a path. You will leave school, move into a van, and devote yourself to climbing.
Your lack of social skills will be one part of why you take up free soloing, climbing by yourself without a rope. But don't worry – you'll eventually find yourself right at home in the climbing community, surrounded by close friends and lifelong partners. You've always loved the physical movement of climbing. There's a certain joy in swinging around, propelling yourself upward, the fluidity of movement. Whether it's climbing trees or buildings as a kid or climbing Half Dome in Yosemite National Park as an adult, you'll come to appreciate the strain in your arms and the burning of your muscles. You'll experience this joy climbing throughout your life; no matter how many routes you climb, it will always be at the core of your drive.
The idea of free soloing El Capitan, the iconic 3,000-foot wall in Yosemite, will become an all-encompassing dream for much of your climbing life. For the first five or six years, you'll be too afraid to try – too afraid to even put any effort toward a potential solo. Right now, you're afraid of so many things: strangers, girls, vegetables, falling to your death. That's fine; fear is a perfectly natural part of life. You will always feel fear. But over time you will realize that the only way to truly manage your fears is to broaden your comfort zone. It's a long, slow process that requires constantly pushing yourself, but eventually you'll feel pretty darn good, and you'll climb big walls just like this.
You'll have near misses and frequently think about death. It will change your perspective and little annoyances will melt away. There will always be people calling you crazy or assuming that you have a death wish – that's fine. They don't see the amount of time and effort that goes into preparation or your drive to do something difficult, especially if it's never been done before.
But you will always find purpose in exploring your own limits. Don't let anyone else's opinion rein you in. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks: live your life in the way that you find most fulfilling.
For many years, climbing will be the most important thing in your life. You will put climbing before everything else. But keep an open mind. Eventually you will have a wonderful girlfriend and a charitable foundation.
In the end, it all comes back to El Capitan. It will give your life direction for almost a decade. It will be your muse, the reason you get up early to train and stay out for long days in the mountains. The day that you finally free solo El Cap will be one of the most satisfying of your life. It will also serve as an important reminder that no summit is more important than the long process of getting there.
Climbing is a lifelong journey; use it to learn and grow.
And Alex, don't forget to enjoy the view.
Source
Maya Angelou’s Beautiful Letter to Her Younger Self
You’re itching to be on your own. You don’t want anybody telling you what time you have to be in at night or how to raise your baby. You’re going to leave your mother’s big comfortable house and she won’t stop you, because she knows you too well.
But listen to what she says:
When you walk out of my door, don’t let anybody raise you — you’ve been raised.
You know right from wrong.
In every relationship you make, you’ll have to show readiness to adjust and make adaptations.
Remember, you can always come home.
You will go home again when the world knocks you down — or when you fall down in full view of the world. But only for two or three weeks at a time. Your mother will pamper you and feed you your favorite meal of red beans and rice. You’ll make a practice of going home so she can liberate you again — one of the greatest gifts, along with nurturing your courage, that she will give you.
Be courageous, but not foolhardy.
Walk proud as you are,
Maya
Source
Letters to a Young Poet (original title, in German: Briefe an einen jungen Dichter)
1. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to, the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.
2. What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.
3. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better
4. Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
Source
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) to future wife Olivia Langdon
You cannot see its intangible waves as they flow towards you, darling, but in these lines you will hear, as it were, the distant beating of the surf.
Source
Dear Me : A letter to my 16 year old self - Stan Lee
I STILL REMEMBER how you always wanted to be a writer. In your last year at DeWitt Clinton High School you practiced signing your name, Stanley Martin Lieber, over and over again, making it look as bold and impressive as any of those at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence. You were certain the day would come when you'd write the Great American Novel and people would ask for your autograph, and you wanted to be prepared.
How could you have imagined the ironic development in later years? Today, people do occasionally request your autograph, but not for the Great American Novel, which you never wrote, but rather for the oh-so-oft-maligned comic books, which nobody ever respected years ago. And, even more ironic, the name you now sign is Stan Lee, which you adopted legally because you were embarrassed that Stanley M. Lieber was writing those lowly comics — which have since become the wellspring for respected motion pictures, TV series, video games, and all sorts of enormously popular globe-spanning entertainment.
So bear this in mind, my impulsive 16-year old self — nothing ever stays the same. Tastes change and the culture changes. The important thing is to stay on top of what is au courant and be resilient enough to go with the flow and change with the tide. And if you're lucky enough to be one who contributes to the change in culture, never forget your roots or those who helped you make the grade.
Excelsior!
— Stan Lee
Source
From Hemingway to Fitzgerald // 28 May, 1934
28 May 1934
Dear Scott:
I liked it and I didn’t. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can’t refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that, Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. You can take you or me or Zelda or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. You can’t make one be another. Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen.
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.
There were wonderful places and nobody else nor none of the boys can write a good one half as good reading as one that doesn’t come out by you, but you cheated too damned much in this one. And you don’t need to.
In the first place I’ve always claimed that you can’t think. All right, we’ll admit you can think. But say you couldn’t think; then you ought to write, invent, out of what you know and keep the people’s antecedents straight. Second place, a long time ago you stopped listening except to the answers to your own questions. You had good stuff in too that it didn’t need. That’s what dries a writer up (we all dry up. That’s no insult to you in person) not listening. That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening.
It’s a lot better than I say. But it’s not as good as you can do. You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, Bo, and they have all these other acrobats that won’t jump.
For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material (as we say at Yale). You can’t think well enough to sit down and write a deliberate masterpiece and if you could get rid of Seldes and those guys that nearly ruined you and turn them out as well as you can and let the spectators yell when it is good and hoot when it is not you would be all right.
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.
About this time I wouldn’t blame you if you gave me a burst. Jesus it’s marvellous to tell other people how to write, live, die etc.
I’d like to see you and talk about things with you sober. You were so damned stinking in N.Y. we didn’t get anywhere. You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write. Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you. It’s not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course you’re a rummy. But you’re no more of a rummy than Joyce is and most good writers are. But Scott, good writers always come back. Always. You are twice as good now as you were at the time you think you were so marvellous. You know I never thought so much of Gatsby at the time. You can write twice as well now as you ever could. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.
Go on and write.
Anyway I’m damned fond of you and I’d like to have a chance to talk sometimes. We had good times talking. Remember that guy we went out to see dying in Neuilly? He was down here this winter. Damned nice guy Canby Chambers. Saw a lot of Dos. He’s in good shape now and he was plenty sick this time last year. How is Scotty and Zelda? Pauline sends her love. We’re all fine. She’s going up to Piggott for a couple of weeks with Patrick. Then bring Bumby back. We have a fine boat. Am going good on a very long story. Hard one to write.
Always your friend
Ernest
Source
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