Time

I don't like time. We never were the best of friends. Virtually always when I plan on writing a song, it's a smack at time. Villainous, life-eating time. I always tried to walk with it side by side, lethargically, lovingly, but it has always insisted on flying past me without the lightest care for looking back, like a methamphetamine-induced kitten, like an angry preacher speeding up his sermon so he can condemn his poor bastard congregation. But there's an added curse: it flies past me when I'm in the moment, waist deep in writing or guitar -- or You for that matter -- and (the kicker) when I completely squander my time. Boredom, you see, never hits me, but the loss tied with it does. Boredom at least slows the world down so as to make its normal uninteresting speed worth riding again.

It's been around seven weeks since I've been employed. Long story. The first three or four weeks were spectacularly slow, but more compacted with busyness than any other time in my life. I played music, breathed with nature, enjoyed the ones I love, and learned, experienced, grew. Twenty-one books were slain, even if most of them had already been started previously. The average lifetime book intake for the average busy-drugged or lazybones American, nota bene, is less than that. I'm starting to get ridiculous; there's literally no subject that doesn't attract me. I leap from macroeconomics to Heideggerian ontology, Nabokovian prose to Chomsky, theology to Neruda, like a four year old addicted to leapfrog. We all know children like to jump. Damn simple life, where leaping is fun.

And I've learned that I'm a bit of a coward. I have one thing in life that I could be doing constantly; something that could literally fulfill my calling, and my salvation, and I stall. Kierkegaard said becoming a Christian for the first time is easier than becoming a Christian once you are one. You always stall. God has placed me on insuperable heights, blazoned with a view of all the wonder of the world, and what happens? I look down. I fear my first step, and what I will do when I realize I need to step back and start again.

It's there, ringing in my brain, shattering the blurry lines between self-annihilating thoughts. Do it.

Do it. Don't think. Dance. You can't think. You can't be taught. You just respond. Life is fully lived beyond the skyline of thought. Trust. Trust me. I have my hand, now give me yours. This is who you are. You are meant to dance, and all dance their own incomparable ways. Dance yours.