The Unobtainable Goal

[William Draven]

Perfection.

I admit it. I've been studying magic since I was a boy and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface yet. I've always sought to climb that mountain of magical knowledge and every time I look up at my goals they all seem so far ahead of me, out of my grasp. I seek to become the master but all I will ever be is the student. It is a frustrating prospect indeed.

But that's what we all are. Students. Sure the path to the top never ends if you look up at the goal, but if you turn around and look down from where you've climbed from the ground is so far beneath you. Nothing worth having is achieved without effort.

 

[Craig Browning]

You're sound like a Seagull I once met. . . his name was Jonathon Livingston. . .

When I was about 13 -14 I remember sitting in my bedroom with my old chum Joel and looking at Melborne Christopher's Illustrated History of Magic. I pointed to a picture of the Dante show spread all over a stage and said, "some day I'll be doing all those illusions". . . skip ahead about 10 years and sure enough, I was breaking my back moving those very same props about a warehouse along with the Thurston show and parts of the Blackstone show amongst others. . . I was part of one of the largest private collection of magic history in the world and it was overwhelming. It gave me significant perspective on things, the most important being that as we learn and evolve in this business we also forget -- we must make room for the new and so nature files the unused and "unnecessary" files somewhere "off site" until they are needed. . . then again, when you start getting older and loosing your mind. . . I mean, memory. . . you will end up like me; shelf after shelf, remote hard-drive after hard-drive filled with volumes of texts, a lot of it you even forget having read until you get back into the book. In fact I just recently scanned through MITOX and Frames of Mind for the first time in several years and it blew me away just how much of that material I'd forgotten -- stuff I loved the idea of but never put into use.

Perfection is unobtainable but it's the journey that makes it worth shooting for.