In Retrospect

I'm looking back over my journal, and I'd like to share an amazing experience I had back on May 29. I was walking down the street, nothing unusual. A man who was mowing his yard said hi, told me he was selling his house. Then another man, stranger, old, breathing smoke from his cigarette, sitting on the stoop where it meets the street, greeted me.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" he asked.
"No" I responded.
"Why not?"
"I don't know, guess I haven't met anyone yet"

"Well" he started to tell me, "You can have the violin making life or the conventional life, but you can't have both." I did a double take, jaw dropped, I'd never met this guy before, but somehow he knew about my ambitions to be a violin maker. 

While a lot of what he told me was very personal and surprisingly accurate, his basic advice rings true for anyone who reads this here, and is worth sharing and repeating. He did not ask me questions, but simply made statements as facts, for me to accept or not. He said that there is this dilemma in my life between the conventional life and my life, that I can't have both, and that I really need to plan: I can't leave it up to fate or luck, and that I need to take the time in my private space to get to know myself "because you don't know yourself as well as you think you do." You need to talk about what is important, but everyone is too impersonal. 

"Know yourself: to thine own self be true" he whispered, exhaling smoke. I wanted to know his name, and asked how he knew all this about me, but he cut me off, standing up saying he had things to do, and had to get back to Pittsburgh. (Ironically, I was born in Pittsburgh) I told him I understand, thanked him for talking, said good bye, and after a couple steps, looked over my shoulder to wave goodbye one last time. I never saw him walk away.

In my mind, I keep going back to the last thing I heard him say, like a ghost the words echo in my mind, and I've started to realize just how very important sharing yourself and what you know is.

"It would be wrong for me to withhold my advice."