I learned to surrender to life: Bashir.
Answers What would you say to someone under ten? · see how other cities answered →
Germantown, Philadelphia. Maceo introduces himself and the platform and asks the usual questions; the answers are not usual. Where is he from? “Germantown, man, but I moved in and out,” with time in New York, where his twin flame is, and two kids at home.
How is he living? “I live good, man. I learned to surrender to life, man. I learned to surrender to all the aspects of life. And now I can get what I want.” What he thinks stops most people is upstream of circumstance: “Everybody’s limited from life. from how they think.” His own method: “As long as I think outside the box, man, I allow the universe to fill in the blanks.”
On the city he does not soften it. “I think Philadelphia is a very historic city,” and “it’s a lot of pain here. It’s a lot of pain. It’s a lot of struggle.” What he does about it is the image the piece is named for: “I’m the candle, I’m the light, so I’m the big candle, and I’m out here trying to light other candles, man,” to help people “understand that they can be much more than they are.”
His message to anyone under ten in Philadelphia is the longest answer he gives: “Dream big. There’s nothing beneath you,” and then, three times over, the thing not to let decide it for you: “Don’t let your environment create who y’all want to be. Don’t let y’all families, don’t let what y’all see on TV, don’t let nothing y’all see outside of y’all self determine who y’all want to be.” The channel titles him Bashir The Businessman. Names are as the channel titled the pieces when they were published; where the transcript heard something different, this page says so rather than choosing. The transcript below is from the original audio.