Ideals and Hopes

"He gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there's some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."

The most painstaking part of the product lies in the finale and in the knowledge of what might have been. What strikes the heart is not what the viewer sees but what the artist might have saw. Not the dancing melodies in our ears but the melodies that might have been written. The pain for the artist is not in the final product but in all the possibilities that were sacrificed along the way...the sacrifices that will never be understood or known.

Rarely are we confronted with right or wrong. Rarely do we confront the entire story. Rarely will we know all that might have been should we see it all. And thus, our choices linger not between right and wrong but between best or better and worse or worst. Rarely is there a right and rarely is there a wrong. Therefore wisdom and ideals matter. Confronted with the understanding of limitless possibilities of best and worst for our time, context, people - we must hold true to the best of ideals, the best of human passion, the best of the soft voice inside us unless we have a more sure word from God.

How can one hold fast to the "belief that idealism, high aspiration and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs -- that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities -- no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems?"

As an artist it is the process, the endeavor, that is most moving and most difficult. For in that endeavor I am pressed up against the reality that holding fast to passion and ideals takes great courage and sacrifice. We will always be left with what might have been....therefore let us grasp, with wisdom from God, what is best for this time, this context, this people. And let us do this with all of our hearts. Even if we are alone in doing so.

"Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh. Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."