Kurt Vonnegut on Choosing Our Stances and Creating Reality

Tuesday Quotes are short explorations of music, life, and the daily endeavor of practicing classical guitar. Find more here. Enjoy!

“We are what we pretend to be so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut

Words matter. They form our version of reality.

Through our words, we create our feelings. And the feelings give more power to the words. They make them true.

When we convince ourselves that we’re too busy, for example, we create that reality. We feel busy. And so we may lose focus and become stressed.

We create many of our limitations by pretending they already exist. We act the part, we talk the talk, and so they come to be.

But we could also “pretend” that we have all the time in the world. We can choose to believe we have plenty of time to do anything we want.

(Ray Dalio suggests we can’t do everything we want to, at least not at once. But we can do virtually anything we want.)

We can pretend to be anything we want. And we can pretend to be however we want.

We can “make believe” we learn things easily. We can try on consistency and patience. We can imagine ourselves calm and aware and engaged.

Then we simply pretend we’re not pretending, and it becomes reality.