Who came before you?

Sometimes, it helps to remember that you’re never alone. You are just one of the more recent people in a long line of people that started before you, connected together by your craft.

In Eat a Peach, David Chang notes the absurdity of working in a kitchen. Every chef goes through extremely high stress, every day, just to make a product that the customer later flushes down the toilet. It makes no sense, so David makes it make sense:

To keep going, you must buy into codes that give meaning to your existence: You are part of a centuries-old continuum that you must honor and preserve at all costs. Every action in a kitchen, every job, every recipe, is the next line in a story that connects back to the previous dinner service, and to the chef who used to work your same station, and to another chef across the ocean, probably long dead, who was the first to figure out how to slice that vegetable in the manner you are now called upon to re-create. Every service is an opportunity to respect that previous contribution and expression and to potentially interpret it in your own way, adding a new pattern to the fabric of culinary history.

In his memoir Words Without Music, Philip Glass describes something similar, eschewing words such as “originality” or “breakthrough.” He writes, For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.”

Philip also recalls the words of blind poet and street musician Moondog, “I am following in the footsteps of Beethoven and Bach. But really, they were such giants, and their footsteps were so far apart, that it is as if I am leaping after them.” 

This is the rare opportunity for you to choose your lineage.

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