One day you won't.
Build a boat and get in the white water.
“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
- Jack Kerouac, On The Road
One day you won't. One day, you won't run the marathon, and why should you? I get it. Your legs will hurt. You'll have to go to work the next day. There may be events for your children that you wouldn't dare be seen hobbling at. There may be meetings where you won't want to forget your words because your brain is still foggy.
If you follow the rules and play the games, move the right pieces and talk to the right people, you'll end up in a safe place. You'll end up in the middle of the distribution curve, along with the other 68% of safeguarded souls who did the same.
Fuck. That scares me to the core. I know when I'm connected to the source, flow state, if you will, I can feel electricity pulse through my body.
Imagine a paintbrush with colour flowing through its bristles, decorating a canvas without returning to the wooden artist's palette. It doesn't make sense, does it? How about a shower running with hot water without turning the taps on? Are you picking up what I'm putting down now?
There is an untapped energy in all of us, an open well. We have an opportunity to drop buckets down into this well and pull up water that glistens and nourishes all that taste it. Yet, one day, you'll stop lowering the rope and bucket into the well. The weight of the rope will become too heavy. The friction of your blisters against the fibres of the hemp rope will be too much. You will develop a hatred for how slow time passes despite the wisdom you hold for slow time. You'll come to play it safe, and piece by piece, your soul will mosaic into rigidity.
Don't build a damn, make yourself a boat. Put yourself in the rapids and the chaos of the white water. If you get tossed out, breathe and float to the top. Put your arm out for a friend, or wait until you get washed up against a rock. You might get tumbled, lose your sense of direction, confuse down with up, and up with left. Yet you'll be in for an adventure. You'll come out laughing once you've coughed the water up. You'll have a story over soup in the log cabin heated by the axe-split oak tree.
Stop. Imagine if you played it safe and you never built the boat. You would have never seen the river from the car park, nor the trees growing for 600 years. Air so pure, it once danced across every leaf in the closest square hectare of forest would never have touched your lungs.
Yet, there was an old-hardened soul in the car park that put you off. They told you the stairs were unsafe, and the railing down was rusty. Fear riddled their voice like an exhaust pipe came loose. A soul-turned mosaic. A book closed so long the pages stuck together. This is the greatest travesty of mankind. A match that made one last valiant attempt to light itself on the wet moss of a stone wall, desperate for a final spark.
If you've ever heard the trends of the ageing, the elders, or the wise - they'll talk about their increasing desire to care less. Specifically, to care less about what others think. Right there, that's the honey at the bottom of the jar. You can dig your spoon in and pull it up; taste it now.
We play it safe because we care what others think. We care more than they do. We care about what they believe more than we should. The reality is they don't. They have a million things perpetually circulating around their minds that they can't hold care much longer than it takes for a bee to land inside a flower and swiftly depart again.
All these 'cares' that we thought we must attend to were actually wasted tickets. Tickets of life we could have cashed in and spent elsewhere. Vouchers of life we let expire. We cared too long about things that didn't grow us, all whilst life was waiting with a watering can. There are thousands of seeds that you wish to plant. Some of them will produce flowers, others fruit. You deserve to see the colours life wants to show you and taste the fruits of your imaginative soul.
Spend your tickets on the marathon, and nourish the seeds in your garden. Build a boat and hit the white water. Build a mosaic, but don't become one. Do it before you don't, because one day you won't.
Big Love,
JL
P.s I'm off to go backpacking and ride a really long way. Because one day I won't. But that time is not now.