Leaping Without Looking

              How careful should we be as we live Life?

              When I look back on my life as I’ve lived it so far, I’m pretty convinced that I’ve played it too safe. There are just so, so many things I didn’t explore or try because there was too much of a chance that they’d turn out badly, or because I just didn’t know what would happen. They include:

- putting myself forward for a challenging job

- travelling to other countries / walking through certain neighborhoods

- telling someone what I really thought

- investing time/money/effort into appealing longshots

- risking violence or confrontation in defense of a person or a value

- declaring my attraction to a person

- putting forward an idea or creation for exploration and judgement

              There are times I have done such things, and I feel good about almost all of them. Yes, I’ve been embarrassed now and then, I’ve been rejected and I’ve failed. But these defeats were hardly ever as bad as I might have feared on those alternate occasions when I didn’t take my shot. I can’t say that I’ve ever suffered a really serious hurt or loss. And, there’s always been the compensation of having tried.

              Besides which, there’ve been the times I’ve succeeded, which have sometimes been life-changing. I once spoke to an attractive woman in a store, based on an instant’s eye contact and a feeling, and she became the love of my life and has shared the last seventeen years with me.

              On the flip side, there have been a handful of times when taking chances, or being careless (is it the same thing?) nearly led to disaster, or could have:

- remaining a passenger in a car with an obviously incompetent driver

- driving a stretch of highway during a snow storm, having decided to ignore alerts

- trying to carry a small amount of pot back onto a cruise ship in Jamaica

              I recall an occasion when I took a bath while a radio that was plugged into an electrical outlet rested on the edge of the tub. It was only much later that I realized what I’d done, and the memory still causes me to cringe.

              Looking over what I’ve written so far, what sticks out is that these near disasters were all over very trivial matters, where the benefit was a matter of a simple pleasure or convenience. I like to think that I’ve learned to do without such risks, but I couldn’t swear that that’s the case. I now recall a time when I ran to the aide of a lone man being attacked by about 5 others. That might have gone badly but didn’t: the group dispersed after a few seconds and I was only a bit bruised – and the victim was very grateful. I’m glad that not all my dangerous risk-taking was over nonsense.

              But when it comes to the big things – love, friendship, values, meaningful achievement – I hope that I might still learn to be bolder. I hope to become freer of fears and doubt of all kinds. Because I truly believe that when we move forward with confidence and with heart and mind focused on good outcomes, we make them more likely, and we make the negative outcomes we would fear less so.

And I don’t think that this is simple optimism. Our outlook orients us, aligns our vision and our energies to respond to what we anticipate. When we expect, or even simply prepare ourselves for what we fear, we are more likely to see it, and to miss everything else. And similarly, if we expect what we desire and are prepared for it, we are positioned to respond to its merest manifestation, and to ignore the seedlings of disaster that may be just as present.

I’m not suggesting that anyone abandon reasonable forethought and planning. But in a world where every moment brings with it almost limitless possibility, it’s so easy to be stalled, discouraged or stopped by all the things that may go wrong, that we can’t possibly prepare for. I’m not literally advocating Leaping without Looking. But I am advocating – for myself anyway – the avoidance of the kind of over-preparation that seeks to eliminate risk by having a remedy for every concern. Better to go forward with confidence and hope and know that these same moments will likely offer unforeseen possibilities as well. I like to think, and I choose to believe, that there are always as many doors opening as there are closing. And in Life, I think that every journey will carry us to a place we cannot fully imagine.

This is the outlook that I will be actively cultivating in myself.

Learning to be a Writer

     It’s what I’ve always wanted to be. I probably started saying so in Junior High, around age 12 or 13. But I probably felt it even before then, from the time my love affair with books and reading began, by age eight if not earlier.

     But I wasn’t ever the kid who wrote actually wrote stories, or who made them up to entertain my friends. Rather, it was something I thought about and imagined. I did well enough with school essays to be complimented on my writing. But, with very few exceptions, and all of them school-related, I don’t recall that I did any actual creative writing until I was an adult.

     So, where did this profession of ambition come from, anyway? Why have I always held to this desire, even while I did so little to realize it? The inquiry is deepened by the fact that I find writing hard, taxing, full of difficulty, and I generally procrastinate and avoid having to do it. Writer’s block to me suggests the always necessary breaking down of mental and emotional walls before I’m even able to start composing a piece. I don’t even feel that I have a particularly good imagination.

     The only thing I can think of, that actually operated in my life to get me writing, to be passionate about it, and to feel driven to it, is communication via letters. And that must have started in earnest with letters to my mother. I corresponded with her from about age 11, a couple of years after my parents’ marriage dissolved, and the time that my living with her ended forever. Aside from my brother, she’s the person I was closest to. And she’s someone who in many respects I was very much like. It’s from her that I inherited my love of books, stories, mythology, and my curiosity about how things work and why things happen. Maybe most of all, a fascination with things I couldn’t figure out, did not understand. What I most remember of the years living with her was our continuous, ongoing conversation, about everything. So, when Mom and I were suddenly and irrevocably apart, letters began to take the place of those conversations, and I began to learn to pour my heart onto a page.

     After my mother, it was girlfriends, and sometimes male friends, to whom I learned to express myself through writing, able to say with time and thought what I never could in person or in the moment. Letters to girlfriends became a way to say the unsayable, to uncork my pent up mind, and to release at least some of that torrent of wondering and feeling and speculation that alternately flows, swirls and erupts as bonds proliferate and strengthen, or erode and wither.

     And then, it was journals. I started keeping a journal just as I turned twenty, and I kept at it for well over thirty years. So while I wasn’t writing stories and submitting them, as I assume other developing writers were, I was sending letters to others, and composing letters to myself in my journal. And while I never thought much about plot, since that was mostly supplied by life, I was much concerned with emotional truth, and how to find and make it plain.

     Here I am now, in my sixties, with all of a half dozen, very minor publishing credits to my name, short stories and essays for which I’ve been compensated a total of maybe six hundred dollars. I still want to be a writer, even if I can’t say exactly why. I know it has something to do with conveying emotional truths, as I struggled to as a teenager. And it has to do with understanding how people connect and making relationships work, as I’ve tried to do throughout the rest of my life. But all that seems almost given, and also almost unrelated to the process of being a writer in the working world.

     Now, I have to learn (and put into practice) much, much more about a business that sells entertainment, experiences and edification. I have to learn to funnel my thought and energy into blocks of constructive time that have little (or at least less) to do with my personally lived life. I must learn about editing and shaping a manuscript, and about addressing a paying audience: agents, publishers and book-sellers as well as readers. And I must learn to make my own, private passions and obsessions shareable, so that others will find a place for them in their own lives.

     And I know that all of this is only just the naïve, outer skin of my own imagined life as writer, as I take the first steps toward actualizing it. There’s so much still that I don’t understand. But I aim to begin. And to succeed.