Create Something. To Do otherwise is Simply to Waste your Precious Life

By: Richard Taylor

But, unless you were born a fool, there are gifts that you do have, many or few, and your task, then, is to nourish and perfect those gifts. Your reward will be some measure of achievement and greatness—not, perhaps, in such things as wealth and position, but in something far more precious; namely, greatness as a human being.

—Richard Taylor

The point simply is that human beings, alone in creation, have the capacity to create. Nothing else does. And that is why human beings alone have a history. They make history—some in great and dramatic ways, others in small and unnoticed ways.

All this points to a kind of imperative, minimally expressed as: Do something.

Better expressed, it says: Create something. To do otherwise is simply to waste your precious life. Do not, as Epictetus expressed it, rest upon your dead kinship with the beasts. All they do is eat, sleep, reproduce, then die and decay.

For a person to do no better than that is in effect to lapse into a mere animal nature.