For Most of My Life ....

.... I followed the safe path.  

A few days ago I came across this first line of a commencement speech made by Debbie Millman to the graduating class of San Jose State University.  From it she wrote an essay titled "Fail Safe," which is part of her 2009 anthology, Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design.  What follows would be inspiring to anyone just on the edge of starting out, at his or her beginning, but for someone like me, someone who made the kind of leap she talks of at mid-life, the one she gives words to, practical, 21st century words, not Dante's Italian or Shakespeare's English, well it sent me reeling.  I felt nothing short of wonder to see the last year of my life in print, to realize I was not the strange creature some people seemed to think I was.  Even I wondered now and again how I found the strength and hope I found to do what I did.

Unlike Millman, I had never stood at a crossroads early in my life choosing possibility over surety.  I too had wanted to be a writer, had believed I might have talent enough to try, but bravery enough to consider that risky, possible path.  I chose certainty.  I chose practical.  I limited my possibilities for many reasons, and I blame my father for not believing in me, but the truth was I didn't believe in myself.  I suffered from an extreme case of lack of imagination, which plagued for many years.  I couldn't believe in the possibility of a life doing anything artistic.  From there I stopped believing in the kind of love that meets you in all the ways you want and need it to.  I stopped believing in change.  My world narrowed to the narrowest path I could imagine.  In this narrowing, my imagination proved all too powerful.

Millman writes: "The grand scheme of life, maybe (just maybe) is not about knowing or not  knowing, choosing or not choosing.  Perhaps what is truly known cannot be described or articulated by creativity or logic or science or art - but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry.  As Robert Frost wrote, a poem "begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.  It is never a thought to begin with."

She continues with the advice for those at their beginnings or those, like me, at midlife in a dark wood and reconsidering, that we take Robert Frost's advice to heart.  She continues: "If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve. Do what you love, and don’t stop until you get what you love. Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now."  Which is exactly what I did.  

It doesn't mean the path is suddenly easy.  It doesn't mean courage and strength aren't required of us, more perhaps late in life than would have been required earlier at our start.  I would say there really is no other choice, not if you want to truly live each and every day of your life.  I was lost and now I'm found.  I was the walking dead, and now I'm one of the living.  It's never too late.  And I could tell my daughter that, or I can live it so she comes to it as real and true and embraces her many amazing possibilities.