Dare

dDare.

As in, double-dog dare. Only, the adult version of it.

When I was twenty and first read T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I was struck by the speaker’s question, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

Do I dare? Do I dare to disturb the comfort of my own little universe, the universe I have carefully measured out, not in coffee spoons, but in falsely created parameters and limits that I don’t cross…because, like Prufrock, I am afraid?

Afraid of going back to school.

Afraid of writing something too honest.

Afraid, maybe, of success.

I keep coming across a quotation from another favorite writer, Mark Twain.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Today, I will Dare to Discover.

 

14 thoughts on “Dare

  1. This is awesome and very honest I really think taking a chance is a dare in life but if you don’t take chances how will you know if you will succeed or not. Come on Maria do it for yourself. If you don’t you won’t know. You could change everything and make a wonderful hit.

  2. I urge you to take this chance to stretch out and dare to fail or succeed. If we try nothing we accomplish the same. I took a different tact and dared to submit to more writing contests this year. Recently i received notification I won the contest and now am a part of the contributing staff to their website.

  3. I love T.S Eliot. And a few of his cats have found their way into my blog posts. The lines you quoted are among my favorites. “Let us go then, you and I…”

Hi! Wanna say something? Go ahead. Be nice.

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s