Create or Die

Don’t listen to the philistines.

Go wild, go crazy, flaunt the rules, I told myself. I was young and idealistic. I knew most geniuses died young. I didn’t care. I admired them. I wanted to be one of them.

I became more sober as I grew into adulthood, but I didn’t know I was such a slow bloomer, that it would take me eight decades to become my truest self.

But everybody is on their own timeline. Some have a long one and some have a shockingly short one. At my age, I still grieve for those in my life who had short timelines, and I commiserate with those who have reached an age where the body is no longer the one you’ve always taken for granted.

You have to be creative, assertive and resistant in old age, or the system will trap you and whack you. The system, by the way, is in your mind at least as much as it is in the manifest world. Watch your thinking. It can be lethal.

I’m still sidestepping the snares, but the final chapter is more real to me now than it has ever been.

For me, it’s a pleasure and an infusion of enthusiasm to start to write. I write to discover, to exercise my love of language, to let a dormant talent work its muscles, but most of all I want to speak ideas into the world.