Good morning,
Let's take a minute and stretch ourselves. First, take your right arm and reach it up to the sky. Keep it up there and bring your left up to meet it. Now, clasp your hands together and bend to the right, then to the left, and maybe fold forward for just a second to stretch your back out. Now let's do a couple neck rolls.
There's this show I love from the 90s called "Northern Exposure," which takes place in a small town in Alaska. The show has a broad cast of characters, and one of the characters is a local DJ and Artist named Chris. When I was a kid, I always wanted to grow up to be like Chris. In one episode, Chris decides he wants to create a pure artistic moment, by taking a cow, putting it in a catapult, and flinging it across a field.
Chris spends forever finding a cow with the right kind of spirit for his scheme. He finally finds one, and puts his plan into motion. Then, one day his film buff friend Ed hears of his plan and gets excited. This is going to be awesome, he says! Just like when they catapulted those cows in Monty Python!
Chris is crushed. He thought he was going to create something pure and original, only to have it reduced to a recycled joke from a movie. He sulks. But eventually, he finds a new thing to put in his catapult. His friend Maggie's old piano, from her home, that burned down in the same episode.
He gathers the towns people together and tells them that there's one thing he's learned here, and this is absolutely key:
It's not the thing you fling. It's the fling itself.
