Stephen Jamison

Early in his career, after a disastrous night on stage in Chicago, Bill Murray walked out into the street ready to end his life, and headed for the lake, thinking he might as well "float for a while" once he was gone... Instead, he turned up Michigan Avenue and found himself in front of the Art Institute of Chicago. He walked inside without even stopping to pay, because, in his words, he felt he was already "pretty much dead," and there, in front of him, was a painting he had always loved: The Song of the Lark, painted by the French artist Jules Breton in 1884. A young peasant woman stands barefoot in an empty field at dawn, a sickle in her hand, pausing in her work to listen to a lark somewhere above her, while behind her a huge orange sun is just rising over the horizon. Murray looked at her and saw a girl with very little to hope for, and yet, as he put it, "the sun’s coming up anyway and she’s got another chance at it." That simple thought was enough to bring him back because it made him feel that he too was a person, with "another chance every day the sun comes up." For every writer, creator and dreamer here on X, I want to leave you with this: think of this story the next time you feel your art is futile, or that your creative pursuit isn’t worth the effort. Somewhere, someday, someone may stand in front of what you made at the lowest moment of their life, and find in it a reason to see the sun come up one more time...