Why Do Anything by Half?
26 May 2012Why do it by half?
Why do anything by half?
An adage from Mr. Henry Rollins:
“Don’t do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with >all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you >hate someone, hate them until it hurts.”
I like this idea. It’s passionate. It’s raw, and it’s flawed.
If you call up a few of the things that you would not want to pour yourself into, such as hating someone, then this would be a hard policy to adopt. But, therein is its hook: if you can’t do it by ‘whole,’’ consider whether you should be doing it at all.
I had the fortune of hearing Rollins speak during his “50th Birthday Tour” at a pub in Manhattan. The venue couldn’t have held more than 150 people and the cramped crowd made it nearly impossible to focus on anything but Rollins voice penetrating a silent room (which is sort of a rarity in NYC). It seemed to magnify the intensity and velocity of his speech as it seemd Henry was trying to break the upper bound of his WPM all for us, because he had a message to tell.
He wasn’t doing fucking nothing by half.
He continued for the full 2-hours like a hunted man with an elaborate secret, telling anyone that wouone that he would tell to anyone who would listen. Henry appeared to measure his time not against an 18-hour work-life slice, but against the entire cake, his lifespan. He wasn’t counting the number of minutes left before the end of his performance, or the number of days until his next vacation. No, he was counting the number of hours, minutes, and seconds left for him to communicate, to connect with other human beings, period.
131,040 hours, 25 minutes, and 13 seconds; 131,040 hours, 25 minutes, and 12 seconds, 131,040 hours, 25 minutes, and 11 sec-