My friend Andy Su was listening to this really awesome music and I was like where is this from? Apparently this composer, Yuki Kajiura, makes really amazing music and it’s all for japanese animation! It’s so good and seriously, if there’s one thing I really appreciate about anime, it’s the creativity of the music composers.

The music really makes you appreciate the amount of feeling that comes from metal strings. My old violin teacher always said the violin was the most beautiful instrument for two reasons — the ability to make fluid continuous sound, and the ability to express feeling through its dynamic, changing sound. Unfortunately the fact that I was a terrible violin player really prevented me from loving the violin until after I had quit. I rediscovered violin music watching some youtube videos and at one point wanted really bad to learn to shred and play electric violin. But then I found music like Yuki Kajiura’s and damn, classical violin really is the best.

Sometimes I regret having quit violin, but I think someday I’ll go back to pick it up along with painting and piano. Come to think of it, there are so many things I want to do in life. I mean, it’s cool being at a crossroads like between high school and college, but at the same time it’s sort of confuddling. There are so many directions a person can take. There is that saying, that 10,000 hours of work in any one direction makes a master for any skill. But deciding which direction to actually take and choosing the optimally satisfying future and career is really difficult. More often than not, reality tears at our dreams, whether it take its form in monetary stumbling blocks or in sheer tests of will.

It’s okay though, because all the feeling that music inspires fails to be reality. The importance of music, art, and all those inspired feelings does not lie within the tangible realm. Instead, feelings are the very dreams we pursue; feelings are intangibles that give cause to what we do. And cause is greater than reality, which is an encouraging detail. What physical force can dislodge a stubborn principle? The most cliche example of this would be “Give me liberty or give me death.” The most that reality can do is change what goes on outside: it cannot change the force of that which exists inside a person.

The thing is, the human struggle is about having enough inner strength to overcome imposed reality. It’s still just that — a struggle. It sounds glamorous on paper, but it’s a pain in real life. And so our dreams bleed into reality in the form of discomfort. It’s discomfort we must conciously decide on, choosing whether to overcome or to give up. I guess at some point, everyone hits a wall. That is both the description and definintion of faith: that inner strength with a finite limit. And at the same time we puzzle over why we have such a limited quantity of what appears to something infinite — is it because it should be infinite? Still, faith is what ultimately determines the outcome of our lives. “Believe in yourself” — what this ridiclously oversimplified anecdote really tries to convey is the need for that thing inside that gives cause to life and everything that a person does in their lifetime.