Interregnum – The problems behind the great content absence of the early twenty-first century.
Monday, February 22, 2010 at 7:20PM Time wastes too fast. Life passes too quickly, and does not follow any rules. I could fill this blog with innumerable words about what happened to me in the last seven hundred odd days, and how the person I am today changed from the person I was yesterday. At times, I didn’t want to change in the slightest degree, and at other times, I wanted to change more than anything, to have my mind rewritten and reprogrammed so that I could forget all that I was. The main thing I learned during all of these phases was simple: change is like gravity. Even if you want to fly, and focus all of your mental energy on levitation and subsequent zooming around, and chant to yourself, “there is no gravity” day in and day out, nothing will happen. You could choose to walk off a tall cliff chanting this, and for a second, you would certainly feel like you were flying. What you would really be feeling is the relentless tug of gravity, pulling you down at 9.8 meters per second, no matter how loud you were chanting or screaming your mantra. Gravity is there whether you want it or not. (It is my recommendation that no one should try the above idea, unless they are from Krypton).
Gravity isn’t all bad though. It prevents us from being thrown bodily into space at any moment, which would be bad. So even when internal inconsequential events are going on, and it feels like we have been disconnected from the world, gravity holds us fast. Change is like gravity. It is neither good nor bad, it merely is. Therefore, what I have really learned is that in life, one has to roll with change, just like one rolls with gravity. Sure, we’d all like to fly, but the sacrifice of not flying is outweighed by not being cast off into the sun or other parts of the universe at some random moment. With the exception of eventually telling some stories that happened to me during this period at some point, there is really nothing for me to say about what happened during those seven hundred odd days. I was learning to deal with change like I deal with gravity. No big deal.
For those of you screaming obscenities and staring angrily at the screen thinking, “that was the biggest bunch of bullcrap I have ever read”, let me tell you two things that are important about the great content absence of these last weeks and months and years. In order for me to tell you that, first, I must tell you a small thing about myself. It has always been my dream to be a writer. When I was a sassy teenager, I would tell anyone who would listen about how I was going to be a great author. (In my defense, I never told people what I was going to write about; in my opinion, you never surrender your ideas for nothing). No, I’m not going to apologize for saying that. I think everyone needs that bit of teenage moxie to get them started.
Let me tell you why it is good to have that moxie at an early age. No matter how good you are at something; how good you think you are; how good you could hypothetically be; or how good you actually are on an absolute scale, at some point, fear creeps into your brain and rumbles through all of your plans and ideas, paralyzing you in innumerable ways. Frank Herbert said it best in Dune, “fear is the mind killer”. (http://www.dunenovels.com/ ). To that perfect definition, I would only add that fear is the time waster, the life taker. I know this because for many of those weeks, I was afraid. At this point you may rightly scoff – “You? Afraid?”, but it is true. At times, I have been afraid of my own dreams. At those moments, it was easier to do anything, take any type of risk, and accept any challenge except those that involved following my dreams. It was easier to focus on the million problems that existed in chasing those dreams, the billion hypotheticals that prevented me from moving forward. Since I was afraid of failing in one way or another, I simply stopped trying. In this way, I found the fastest way to hit the ground and fail – I simply didn’t try. It was deplorable.
For a while, I wouldn’t admit that I was afraid. I was out doing things that were incredibly risky, tiring and time consuming. I told myself that I would merely write the next day. It was simply to murmur to myself that I would do it the next day, and watch Monday turn into Thursday turn into another week turn into another three months. In this fashion, with quiet complacency, it was easy to partially kill myself and my dreams. That’s what I really want to apologize for – the loss of time. Not to you, the reader – but if you want, partially to you, but to me – because while it’s easy to live with no regrets in many ways, lost time, and lost friends are things you can never get back. There’s a story about how I stopped being complacent, and stopped being afraid – but I’m not going to tell it, because it’s an everyday story, one of small victories and constant battles. I’m happy to say that it’s a story of how I broke free of my own inertia, remembered my panache, remembered who I was and placed myself back on the path to my dreams with simple words. For me, those words were simple. Time wastes too fast. Life your dreams now. Life’s better with dreams; because the world needs dreams and imagination now – because it’s too full of fear and complacency. With that, I’ll be here on Friday, to tell you about how I see the mystic dreams of this site in the future.
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