Yours to Do

"Why try to write - everything has been written already", seemed to be my attitude of mind. But that vanished when I had the first paragraph written.

L.M. Montgomery, 1935

Isn't it refreshing to read the thoughts of a woman seventy-eight years ago and see that she struggled with all the same self-talk we still face today?

I don't care what it is you kind of like to do, you must occasionally have a thought like this, a voice that says, Perhaps it has already been done the best that it can be.

We have to fight this. Let's not even think of the best as the thing for which we're reaching, but simply ours to do. Some author once said that all things ever written exist together in the whole of written words - like a lake. And the things she writes  may not be the biggest or the brightest parts, but all words feed the lake and therefore matter. Life is sort of like that.

You matter. You have something to give. You have a part to play. No one else can do it. They probably don't want to do it. And they certainly don't have time. You don't have to do all the things. Not everything that's asked of you, not everything that needs done. You should only do the thing that's yours to do, and you should do it so well and so you that at least there can be no doubt within your own quiet soul, "This was mine, and I was brave enough to do it."