When you went away, where did you go…?
You ask yourself a lot of interesting questions on the way to growing up. You ask yourself a lot of questions on the way to getting older as well. It doesn’t have to be the transition between being a child and being an adult, it can be the transition from adult to wise adult. That’s an important distinction I think. I see and meet a lot of interesting people in my walk of personal achievement (lets hope), and I always make it my business to notice little things. That person you ran into that you haven’t seen since grade school, the golden hearted transient beggar who asked you for a dollar and told you an interesting story, or maybe that person who became a friend who became a lover. Everyone has these little nuggets of truth inside of them that are just waiting to come out. I think it’s our job as people to bring out those truths in everyone we meet. Perhaps we as people aren’t so much people as just sponges.
Consider this: You go through life absorbing new information constantly. At the speed of light your brain downloads new tidbits about the world around you until you reach a comfort zone. Once you reach that level of self-assuredness and you’re able to walk out of your door, get into your car and drive without the fear of getting lost, your brain does something brand new. It starts seeking out new things, new bits that you didn’t know before. So where are you? You’re always between the state of learning and the state of knowing. What’s in between learning and knowing? That white, fluffy substance sandwiched by the Oreo Cookies of knowledge is life. Plain and simple, there isn’t really a great mystery behind it all. It’s just life. Welcome to it.
Its an ever rolling wheel for me. Things never get dull, they never stagnate and thankfully, my life never allows me to get too comfortable. I think that’s a failing a lot of people have, comfort. Comfort should be something that makes you feel confident enough in yourself to make a decision; it shouldn’t be a crutch, something that hinders you from moving forward and finding a new balance. Approach every new situation like a flight of stairs. You, like that universally understood map at the front of your favorite shopping mall says, are here. This is step one. Where you want to go is step ’Who knows’. Breathe it in. If it frightens you, swallow anyway. The best way to get a raw clam down is in one big, slimy gulp. Maybe you’ll walk in a marathon to save the children, maybe you’ll join green peace and hug a tree, maybe you’ll learn how to do your own taxes and become a better, more rounded individual; the point is to learn to experience.
We are creatures of habit, we are creatures of impression. We do what feels right because it’s habitual; we say what feels right because, despite how original we think we are, we’ve let something sway our opinion of something else. We’re not Rembrandts, we’re not Savants, we’re not rocket scientists forging a new future through space age technology- we’re mammals. We do what feels right. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury of life, feel it. For God’s sake, feel it. If you can’t do anything else with your experiences, at least go through the motions and do it with feeling. You never know, somewhere in this big, galactic, spinning toilet bowl you might just run into something you love. If you don’t, I’ll be more than surprised.
Maybe you love a woman. Maybe you love a man. Maybe you love yourself more than you should. Maybe, just maybe that brown bump on the back of your shoulder gives you character. Whatever the maybe is, make sure it’s you. Do you. People far too often decide to be someone else and when that happens, we are all cheated out of an opportunity to meet a wonderful, engaging human being with the ability to make our light shine all the brighter. This isn’t bottled optimism, it isn’t backwards pessimism, this is me celebrating you.
When you’re seventy-seven years old and you think back to that day you were thirty-five, remember it in vivid detail. Remember how you’d just purchased that sports car you always wanted and you let the top down. Remember how the wind felt splashing against your skin, gently massaging your cares away as you push it past third gear. Remember how you felt so alive that day and how you knew that, while there’d be other good days, other excellent moments, none would feel exactly like that one day.
Think that’s impossible? I’ll give you an example:
I’m in the car on my way home from work when it starts to rain from a pewter sky. The radio tells me a tornado has hit some two counties away, blasting away rooftops and plough trucks from farmland as far as the eye can see. The sky slowly starts to boil until all of the clouds have smoothed themselves over like some divine icing. It all turns the strangest, most euphoric tan color and everything is painted in the same, even, natural light. I open the sunroof, let down all of my windows, blast the symphonic orchestra playing through the FM band waves and step on it. I’m the only car on the highway for miles and for that single moment I felt what freedom is supposed to feel like.
People, let me tell you, there is no better feeling in the world.
Do me a favor and look on. Look on and live on, move onward and upward. You’ll become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a network technician at some company that sells shoe polish. You’ll run the decathlon; you’ll run, but maybe for mayor. You’ll build houses, you’ll make toys, and perhaps you’ll be the first female president. As you go on to be the you that you’ve chosen, remember this my evil minions, no matter how mean Papa Forte seemed, his bark was worse than his bite, and he’s probably unbelievably proud of you.
So drop a line… one, two? Send some Kool-Aid through the mail; boil some shiny McDonald’s cheese for fun, whatever. Just keep two things in mind:
1) I’m back. Probably to stay.
2) You fuckin’ rock.
Don’t let anybody tell you different.
Hybrid: Out.
Consider this: You go through life absorbing new information constantly. At the speed of light your brain downloads new tidbits about the world around you until you reach a comfort zone. Once you reach that level of self-assuredness and you’re able to walk out of your door, get into your car and drive without the fear of getting lost, your brain does something brand new. It starts seeking out new things, new bits that you didn’t know before. So where are you? You’re always between the state of learning and the state of knowing. What’s in between learning and knowing? That white, fluffy substance sandwiched by the Oreo Cookies of knowledge is life. Plain and simple, there isn’t really a great mystery behind it all. It’s just life. Welcome to it.
Its an ever rolling wheel for me. Things never get dull, they never stagnate and thankfully, my life never allows me to get too comfortable. I think that’s a failing a lot of people have, comfort. Comfort should be something that makes you feel confident enough in yourself to make a decision; it shouldn’t be a crutch, something that hinders you from moving forward and finding a new balance. Approach every new situation like a flight of stairs. You, like that universally understood map at the front of your favorite shopping mall says, are here. This is step one. Where you want to go is step ’Who knows’. Breathe it in. If it frightens you, swallow anyway. The best way to get a raw clam down is in one big, slimy gulp. Maybe you’ll walk in a marathon to save the children, maybe you’ll join green peace and hug a tree, maybe you’ll learn how to do your own taxes and become a better, more rounded individual; the point is to learn to experience.
We are creatures of habit, we are creatures of impression. We do what feels right because it’s habitual; we say what feels right because, despite how original we think we are, we’ve let something sway our opinion of something else. We’re not Rembrandts, we’re not Savants, we’re not rocket scientists forging a new future through space age technology- we’re mammals. We do what feels right. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury of life, feel it. For God’s sake, feel it. If you can’t do anything else with your experiences, at least go through the motions and do it with feeling. You never know, somewhere in this big, galactic, spinning toilet bowl you might just run into something you love. If you don’t, I’ll be more than surprised.
Maybe you love a woman. Maybe you love a man. Maybe you love yourself more than you should. Maybe, just maybe that brown bump on the back of your shoulder gives you character. Whatever the maybe is, make sure it’s you. Do you. People far too often decide to be someone else and when that happens, we are all cheated out of an opportunity to meet a wonderful, engaging human being with the ability to make our light shine all the brighter. This isn’t bottled optimism, it isn’t backwards pessimism, this is me celebrating you.
When you’re seventy-seven years old and you think back to that day you were thirty-five, remember it in vivid detail. Remember how you’d just purchased that sports car you always wanted and you let the top down. Remember how the wind felt splashing against your skin, gently massaging your cares away as you push it past third gear. Remember how you felt so alive that day and how you knew that, while there’d be other good days, other excellent moments, none would feel exactly like that one day.
Think that’s impossible? I’ll give you an example:
I’m in the car on my way home from work when it starts to rain from a pewter sky. The radio tells me a tornado has hit some two counties away, blasting away rooftops and plough trucks from farmland as far as the eye can see. The sky slowly starts to boil until all of the clouds have smoothed themselves over like some divine icing. It all turns the strangest, most euphoric tan color and everything is painted in the same, even, natural light. I open the sunroof, let down all of my windows, blast the symphonic orchestra playing through the FM band waves and step on it. I’m the only car on the highway for miles and for that single moment I felt what freedom is supposed to feel like.
People, let me tell you, there is no better feeling in the world.
Do me a favor and look on. Look on and live on, move onward and upward. You’ll become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a network technician at some company that sells shoe polish. You’ll run the decathlon; you’ll run, but maybe for mayor. You’ll build houses, you’ll make toys, and perhaps you’ll be the first female president. As you go on to be the you that you’ve chosen, remember this my evil minions, no matter how mean Papa Forte seemed, his bark was worse than his bite, and he’s probably unbelievably proud of you.
So drop a line… one, two? Send some Kool-Aid through the mail; boil some shiny McDonald’s cheese for fun, whatever. Just keep two things in mind:
1) I’m back. Probably to stay.
2) You fuckin’ rock.
Don’t let anybody tell you different.
Hybrid: Out.