One Day At A Time

Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal. Now is your time. Walk closely with people you love. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep travelling honestly along life’s path.

Asking young people to step into a circle of trust and authenticity and share their inner wisdom, a wisdom they often don’t know they actually have sometimes, is a beautiful experience. But as you might imagine, young people today are so wary of adults and their methods of manipulation, coercion, pushing their own agenda, etc., that it requires an absolutely pure environment for them to decide they will open up.

When you get to a point where you’ve read an amazing number of books, you change. You’ve read so much that what may seem new or interesting to most (and even to the writer of the book you’re reading) is just a variation to you. Your expectations regarding the work change.

Due to subjectivity being what it is, many writers can mistake what’s happening and view it as the books getting worse, not their own aesthetic changing. Two things can happen. One, despair at what they perceive is the dying of quality. You see this a lot with people who hit a certain number of books read: they begin to rail against the dreadfulness of everything. It can lead to bitterness, cynicism, and outright hatred of something they previously loved.

Secondly, and you see this with a lot of artists, is that they begin to gravitate toward something that feels new to them. They seek out ‘artist’s artists’ and are not happy when those voices aren’t welcomed by the mainstream, because these are stories aimed at people who’ve simply consumed a terrific amount of fiction to be able to enjoy the work.

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

I decided on you, don’t you get that? I decided on you. I don’t want to go fucking other people and then walk around feeling thrilled and then sad, or empty, or whatever. I like the smell of your hair, and I like the sound of your voice, and I fucking decided on you.

Student voice is important but it is essential that if we ask them to take the time to share their thoughts, that we also show progress in what they have asked.

Say you walk into a Starbucks. You’re given a limited menu of choices - you’ve got coffee, mochas and lattes in various flavors and styles. But maybe you think about it a minute and realize you don’t want any of those things. What then? The menu never says it, but you do have another choice - you can walk out. When you go to university, you’re given the choice between a limited set of paths. No one ever tells you, but you can instead make your own choice, and walk out.

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.

Stop trying to ‘get it together’. The biggest lie we’re told when we’re growing up is that soon as we’re adults, as soon as we’re in college, finish college, get that job, have that steady income, find that someone special, ‘find ourselves’, find that perfect house, get that retirement fund, have those children, everything will fall into place. Here’s a secret: it won’t. Every new development in your life, good or bad, big or small, will come with its own very special set of challenges. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.