I'm too old to hate my life

On the way home last night, I heard this lyric in a song: I'm too old to hate my life.

There are a lot of ways to interpret it. As evidence, there's my Facebook page were some people find that amusing. I don't have a problem with that, but I feel this is a serious idea.

The first thing that comes to mind is this is my life. I have to own it. I'm not fourteen. Nobody is doing this to me. I understand that some of us are unhappy with where they ended up due to their own mistakes. And people have their issues with their upbringing and where that left them.

But then there's gratitude. Gratitude for what we have. Instead of being resentful of the bad, be grateful for the good. It's all about the focus. I don't have time for the crap.

new art

Cindy and I were discussing how artists use the work of other artists in their work. Later on I happened to come across a quote about this. I looked it up and there was a rabbit hole.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/

...a modest canon: “That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.”
—W. H. Davenport Adams

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.
—T. S. Eliot

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
—Lionel Trilling

Igor Stravinsky said to me of his Three Songs by William Shakespeare, in which he epitomized his discovery of Webern’s music: “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”
—Peter Yates

There is probably more truth than we care to admit in William Faulkner’s observation that, “immature artists copy, great artists steal.” Knowing what and when to steal is very much a part of the designer’s self-education.
—1974 book about stage design for theaters

Most of these quotes talk about artists/poets/writers stealing work, and how it's apparently a good thing. That seems strange, but nobody works in a vacuum. Everyone is influenced by those who have come before. It's what one does with that influence that makes the difference. Don't steal their ideas and present them as your own, take their ideas and incorporate them into your own work.