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Every Year Should Be Greater

[…] We must be judged not by our present, but by the  distant goal to which we have earnestly set our faces.

It is said that one day a friend called the studio of one of our great American painters. After examining the many beautiful specimens of art, which adorned the studio, he asked the artist which was his masterpiece. The great painter took his friend to the other side of the room and showed him a large piece of white canvas stretched in a beautiful frame.

“That is my best work,” he said. “I am sorry I cannot show you that picture. I am always trying, but it still creeps ahead of me. I have painted it there in my mind a thousand times, and some day perhaps I will be able to paint it as I see it.”

It was this aspiration rather than any finished picture which was the measure of the artist’s soul.

Rotary must ever keep before it the white canvas on which it expects some day to throw its very best. To lead this “living force” upward to its higher and completer expression is the inspiring task to which I invite my successors. Only men who are sincere, lovers of their fellows, devoted to truth and righteousness, are worthy of the task […].

From: “Rotary as a Living Force”, by E. Leslie Pidgeon, The Rotarian, August 1918