On Being Remarkable

I had an e-mail exchange with Mary Alice Kenley today. We met through our work with the Global Design Alliance.

Mary Alice is one of the most remarkable people I know. She's spent her life in public service. In fact, she has a congressional award. But the thing that makes Mary Alice remarkable isn't the things that she's done. It is who she is.

Of all of the people I've ever met, Mary Alice is one of the few who actually lives every day of her life to the fullest. She has taken her gifts and talents, and simply through the art of being herself, she has cultivated the ground she was planted in near Birmingham and made wonderful things happen.

My e-mail conversation with her made me look up a paragraph I read earlier in the week that sounded just like her. It is from Dale Carnegie's How to Worry Less and Live More (1944).

You are something new in the world. Be glad of it. Make the most of what nature gave you. In the last analysis, all art is autobiographical. You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are.

All art is autobiographical. I love that.

Mary Alice, you are very much a work of art. (I hope you Google yourself one day and find out I said so!)