If not now, when?

"Do it now! Sometimes 'later' becomes 'never'" Unknown

"Neglect enough todays, and you'll experience the 'someday' you wanted to avoid!" John C. Maxwell

In my own life, after 28 years, almost 29, I feel that I have never done that one thing, that noble thing that defines a life. I am used to flying below the radar, enjoying the little things in life... But I have not been truly tested. I have not gone to India to explore my life. I have not been in a major car accident(but I did fall on my head and cracked my skull when I was a kid), or fathered a child. I have not created a life, nor have I killed anyone (only on a fake battlefield). I am neutral. I haven’t started a war and I haven’t stopped a war (only in airsoft). I have broken even with my life. I have a nice home, I have a good – nope, just decent car, good entourage, etc... But I have not taken that step, or risk, that makes the air I have breathed for 28 years worthwhile.

I have said “later” to most anything that required true sacrifice. Later I will spend a weekend reading real books, not just comic books or articles online... Later I will finish working on those drawings. Later I will visit the friends I haven't seen in a really long time, but of course I promised to stay in touch. Later later later later. It is too easy to say “later” because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for success. But, right now, I'm trying to go for something else... For something different.

I've realized I'm writing a whole lot of words but how is this related to you? What am I doing? I must erase this and go to bed... Maybe just write a bit more and go to bed.

In the 60s, believe it or not, before the automated answering machine was invented, you had operators on the phone sitting down and answering the phone for you while you were away. Yes, real people just answering phone and taking down messages for you. I'm sure when the first automatic telephone answering machine was introduced onto the market, conversations at the dinner table were often about the future, and whether the world would accept these new machines. And as soon as these machines we available to the public, these mechanical answering machines were everywhere. The whole idea of a human answering your phone while you were away was no longer important. People were talking with machines, regularly and familiarly. Making funny phone messages, personalizing the machine of forward motion that had arrived in their homes. There was no way back. The machine was a part of life, but only when everyone learned to personalize it.

I propose that, like the world embraced those telephone answering devices, we talk to the machines. We deal with the future that is already here. It isn’t even the future, it is now, so let us talk to the Machine and see what it says to us.

I want to bring soul and character to what is already there.

Maybe I’m crazy, but I really do think I have to write whatever is on my mind. And if you’re reading this, it means that I didn’t conquer this statement with my own fears of rejection. If you know me, you know that “rejection” and “fear” are far from being my favorite words. But this is more than just a long ass letter. This is not the equivalent of one of those magnetic “poetry kits,” you know the ones you buy at the Hallmark section in the grocery store, a mess of words so you can assemble funny poems on your refrigerator door. This is how I feel. This is from my heart. This is me opening up to you.

But as I sit here in the darkness of my room, the answer to the future is rather obvious. If the tapdancing becomes less constant, less furious, less necessary, what will the result be? The result will be more honesty, more focus, fewer "laters". Because the new day of honesty will create a machine more personalized, more truthful, and when we don't bullshit each other (and ourselves), we will have a greater chance of greatness the next day.

Alright… Let’s focus.

Learn who people are. That is the stuff of any relationship. That is what will matter. It is inevitable, at some point in our lives, to keep people from leaving. People always respond best to personal attention, it is the simplest and easiest truth to forget.

Love the person… Be the person.

Life, I believe, is not all fun and games where we forget the difficulties and anxieties. Life is the duty of confronting all of that within ourselves. Dostoyevsky said: “man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” I am not the most successful male in my family, and I am hardly the happiest. My brother works for a bank. He was originally targeted as the “successful” one in my family (and it looks like he is). But he gave up early, for a quieter kind of success. He wanted to become a CEO of the bank but now he wants to start his own business... something that is not related to his field of studies at all. He was once tortured, now he is quietly making the world a better place. He learned earlier what I am just now starting to wake up to. He sleeps well at night. And he doesn’t worry about being too preoccupied or too busy to get the dance right. He dances for something greater. Norman Cousins said that the tragedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live…

I have never been a writer, but I can see how this great form of art will never truly die. Putting words to paper is a sacred thing (or typing them onto a computer). It’s more than a phone conversation, it is a document. It is something you are putting on paper. The relationship between a phone call and a letter is the difference between a magazine and a phone book. One you leave on a plane, the other you save (do people still use phonebooks or am I that old that I remember phonebooks before we got the smartphones?).

I choose to be passionate again. I choose to reclaim everything that was once there (or at least something...). I hope you understand. In the words of Martin Luther King: “A life is not worth living until you have something to die for.”

A life is not worth living if you are sleepwalking through it. Because that is what feels like death. This is what causes friends to become strangers, lovers to enemies… This is what causes to people, out of despair, to get drunk and get into car accidents... or lash out on someone they love. We cannot sleepwalk. We cannot just survive, and believe that anything goes. We can take control of our lives, we can quit sleepwalking, we can say: “right now, this is my life” (and this is what I'm trying to do in this letter). It is time to not second guess, to move forward, to make mistakes if I have to, but to do it with a greater good in mind.