Playing Checkers With Your Cat

Citizens, it is imperative that we all realize the value of self-pity.

Self-pity is the tweezers dropping the fly in the ointment. Self-pity is ten gallons of ice cream for breakfast. Self-pity is the shadow of the clouds that bring torrents of cleansing rain. Self-pity is the friend that never calls until he’s drunk, broke, and in jail.

We all hurt. We all feel shame and pain and fear. And the weight of all that feels like Ossa on Pelion sometimes. But we are each Atlas, strong enough to make moles of our mountains.

Death is the only thing you don’t come back from. Death is the only defeat. Who chooses not to rise chooses not to breathe.

It’s easy for us to beat ourselves up. There’s no challenge in an opponent who won’t fight back. There’s no glory in victory over a spoiled, self-indulgent child. You may as well play checkers with your cat.

There are examples all around us. Trees survive lightning, fires, and droughts with less resources than the least of us. And as tempted as we may be to stop, take root, and wait for troubles to pass around us, each kind thrives best according to its nature.

We make meaning because we need it. We do not accept the hand-me-down dictates of old. We dance on the knife-edge, and no amount of denial will ever blunt that blade.

Take the last chance as your first step. Accept no substitutes for who you have to be.

Free Range Children

Citizens, safety is a cage.

We of the Collective went for a walk the other day. As we enjoyed the afternoon sun and freshly polluted air, we passed a little playground behind a chain-link fence. The fence kept out the unwanted. But it also gave the playground the aspect of a prison yard – as if to say “Kids, your playtime is a tiny island of safety in a wide dangerous world.” And the playground was right next to a big beautiful park full of grass, gentle hills, water playgrounds, slides, picnic tables, and baseball diamonds.

Life is an adorable puppy with sharp teeth and fast-snapping jaws. No one denies the danger that surrounds us at every turn: child snatchers, ill-tempered cats, blimpwrecks, poison rhinos, and worse. But to wall it all out is to wall ourselves in. Safety from danger puts you in peril of never having lived.

Write fewer drafts. Go with your gut and let your mind grind its teeth in futile frustration. Teach yourself through failure. Sail the coast and to hell with the charts.

Make Time to Take Time

Citizens, the world affords you precious little space to be what you would.

We are hemmed in by walls of logic. Reason crushes our golden curls like a ridiculous uncle who mistakes abrasion for affection. Two steps to the left, three to the right, sit down, hands at ten and two, sixty minutes for lunch and ten for coffee. Thus we tick away the time allotted us.

So make space for what has no room in the digital world: surrealism. Play chess with tangerines. Laugh at Wyoming.  Paint smiley faces at the bottom of every coffee mug in the breakroom.