Worthwhile

"I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there...

What if I came to the end of my life, and realized that I had spent

everyday, watching for a man who would never come to me?

What an unbearable sorrow it would be to realize:

I never really tasted the things I had eaten,

or seen the places I had been;

because I thought of nothing but the Chairman,

even while my life was drifting away from me.

And yet, if I drew my thoughts back from him,

what life would I have?

I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood,

for a performance she would never give."

-Sayuri Nitta,

Memoirs of a Geisha