Front Facing 3/15/09

It is ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living.

Suzanne Farrell
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Hello again.
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As I am fond of saying: "What's the next step in life? It's the one right in front of you." Life is unfinished business. There is always something to worry about or something to regret. We spend too much time trying to make things go the way we want them to or fruitlessly trying to fix things that weren't right when we did them. And while we're doing that we are missing out on the real life that's going on. The past is stuff for historians who hardly ever agree with each other, and the future is for prophets who are hardly ever right. So where does that leave us? With both feet planted firmly in the "now,"

It's good to make amends if you can and it's good to plan for the future. We all do that. But floating along on a cloud of "maybes" deprives us of the joy of living in the energy beams of the palpitating present.

"Where did it all go?" older people ask. It went right in front of your eyes and you didn't notice it. When I was learning to be an actor, I learned about observation, about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching as much as I could. Then I asked myself why I was so busy doing that. Soon I learned that it wasn't just to gather information and images but to make a form of personal sense out of them. Like a giant puzzle I was storing up bits and pieces of the world around me to eventually help me put together a meaningful life as a man and an artist. Not a complete picture, certainly, but fragments that could lead me to understand more and to share what I knew with those around me and to learn what their observations had given them. That pleases me, because if we knew everything there is no know there would be no point in living or being with other people, would there?

The great doorway of the mind should always be open for the big and small things to flutter in. Yearning to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else is a betrayal of where I am, whom I'm with and the life I am actually living.

DB - The Vagabond
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Smile at someone who looks sad, even if it's yourself.