Sit down and shut up.
Sit down and listen. Listen to everything you can hear. Listen to baroque classical music. Listen to jazz, bluegrass, blues, and rock and roll music. Listen to a vinyl record or a jukebox. Listen to the people as they go by. Go away from the people and listen to what else is to be heard. Listen to old men tell stories. Listen to children tell stories. Then listen to silence. When you grow tired of the silence, and the time comes to speak, fill it with something worth hearing.
Sit down and look. Watch everything you can see. Sit in one spot and watch the people go by. Watch them work and watch them play. Look at family photos. Look at great works of art. Look at a child's art. Look at the magnificent monuments and structures men have built. Look at maps. Watch live plays and improv. Watch old movies, and silent movies. Watch ballet dancers. Watch Fred Astaire or Gregory Hines tap dance. Watch a traditional Native American war dance. Watch a church service, Catholic and Protestant. Watch the people at funerals, weddings, and airports. Watch the people in elevators. Then sit alone and watch absolute darkness. When you grow tired of the darkness and the time comes to be seen, fill it with something worth seeing.
Sit down and read. Read everything you can find. Read the newspaper. Read old newspapers. Read Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Then read Alexander, Sun-Tzu, and Hitler. Read Chaucer and Shakespeare. Read Marx, Swift, and Payne. Read Aquinas, Neitze, and Voltaire, Twain and Wilde. Read Freud, Darwin, and Jung. Read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Read the Bible, the Koran, and the Tao of Pooh. Read everything from Homer to Hemmingway, from Zulu to Zoroaster. Then read an empty page. When you grow tired of the empty page and the time comes to write, fill it with something worth reading.
Now get up and go. Go everywhere you can go. Go to work and to class and to church. Go down the hall or downtown. Go down a river in an old canoe, or up a mountain in an old pair of boots. Go great distances to foreign worlds. Go somewhere where they don't speak your language. Go somewhere that no one else knows is there. Go in a plane or boat or a train. Drive or ride. Go on horseback, high in the saddle. Go West. Go every direction. Go on your own feet through miles of backcountry. Swim or sail through lakes and oceans. Wade through the labrynth of a large city. Then come back home and go absolutely nowhere. When the time comes, make home someplace worth going.
In short, if you don't have anything decent to contribute to humanity, keep it to yourself, you ignorant, slovenly MTV excuses for people.
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