Quotes from Dear Friends

Today while drinking my coffee in Kadikoy (Previously named as Chalcedon which means the city of the blind), I added a new page to my blog and started writing my favorite quotes. Actually, I was going to read Hard to Be a God by Arkadi and Boris Strugatski which I have bought just five minutes before from a local bookstore 6:45. However, as this quote thing came up to my mind I closed the book even before finishing the first paragraph.

I wrote some of my favorite quotes and many more will come in the future. The page is here. In fact, writing your favorite quotes is hard work mostly because I was remembering the general sentence but needed the assistance of Google to find the whole. And I needed to translate some of them on my own as Omar Khayyam’s original work can’t be found in English.

Most of those quotes are mainstream ones but there were also pieces in my memory of words said by some of my friends. So here are some of them and why they are meaningful for me.

Yeni bir eve taşınmayı düşünüyorum, burada artık fazla rahatım, bu yaratıcılığımı engelliyor.
I am planning to move to a new house, I am too much in my comfort zone here, it kills my creativity.
- Emre Tankal

Last summer, his niece introduced me to Emre. He is one of the best guitarists I have ever know. He plays jazz with his quartet and is the guitarist of one of the famous Turkish musicians Birsen Tezer. It has been six months now and he has said many beautiful words but these are the ones I like the most.

He was planning to move to a new house but not because there were problems just because it was feeling too comfortable. In an evolutionary perspective, homo sapiens seek comfort. Making habits is easy, living a monotonous life is energy efficient. But it is not meant for creative people. I am a coder and he is a musician but at the end of the day what we do is the same: creating something new.

Comfort is the arch-nemesis of creative people and Emre showed me even the most simple thing like where we live can hold us back.

Bu hayatta neyi başarmak istiyorsun sorusu aslında hangi zorluklarla yüzleşmeye hazırsın sorusuyla aynıdır.
The question what you want to achieve in life actually means which challenges are you ready to face.
- Alp Köksal

I met with Alp three years ago when he was a speaker in my school’s Technology Days. He is the coordinator of Khan Academy Turkish and a very friendly person. After having lunch, we grabbed some warm tea as he had a sore throat. Then we had this conversation about shooting for the stars and he told me this sentence.

When you ask people what they want to achieve or have in life they can say many things but not that many when you ask what challenges they want to face. But those two are the same unfortunately for the ones who want to get rich overnight. I don’t also think hard work is not enough without other things but this will be the topic of another post. Nevertheless, if you want to meet you gonna go out and hunt for it.

Tanrıya inanmasam bile orda bir yerde bir yaratıcı olduğuna inanmak istiyorum, bu beni rahatlatıyor.
Even though I don’t believe in God, I prefer to believe there is a creator out there, it soothes me.
- A friend whom I call Psi

Psi was a very close friend of mine, I am not giving out his name as we are not in good terms lately. What makes this quote special for me is that I can’t agree with it. To start with, it is self-contradicting but this reminds me to do something when I contradict with myself.

But more importantly, it shows a very basic human feeling: fear. Like saying that you want to achieve a lot of thing without not wanting to face challenges, saying God doesn’t exist without taking great responsibility is impossible.

If there is no higher being out there then you are on your own, all the things you face are a consequence of your actions. Accepting this is hard for people and it is why we want to have a family, accept a religion, try to act morally or even try to create value. All of them is a form of surrendering to a higher meaning. I prefer the later one, Psi prefers a creator out there.

As Emre said creative people need discomfort but what this actually means is that we need discomfort in our ordinary life. Because comfort is like a monogamous partner you can only choose one form of it. Creating something is also finding comfort in our selves, the ecstasy of turning nothing to something makes us feel satisfied and powerful.

FURTHER LISTENINGS

I am leaving here some of Emre’s latest work from Eastern Standards which is a project for meeting Turkish folk songs with jazz. All the lyrics are in Turkish but his guitar has no language.

• Agla Gitar
• Denizde Aksam
• Beyaz Giyme