In Praise of Independence

As with us all, many times in my life I’ve had my wagon necessarily hitched to some institution or someone else’s star and found myself in a bad neighborhood. You do the necessary repair work as best you can, but your tools don’t fit their screws and nails and you’re hobbling along with a rickety wheel on a rocky road. Finally, they kick you off the wagon— or if you’re more sensible than me, you voluntarily alight and start walking on your own.

Of course, no one’s on their own, but now you start to gather the folks you choose to sit with you and help pull the wagon and that’s a whole different feeling. It’s not pitch perfect— we are fallible human beings after all— but it is a cleansing exhale of relief to remove the top layer hovering above and let the sun shine down. And so these thoughts:

• It is exhausting to march to someone else’s drumbeat— especially when they have a lousy sense of rhythm.

• To work unencumbered to the edge of your passion—that’s the way it’s spozed to be.

• Don’t be the first to stand under some elses’s arches when they pull away the scaffolding. (In ancient Rome, the architects were required to be the first to stand under the arches they built.) 

• “Run like hell from someone likely to put a sharp knife into the sacred, tender vision

    of your beautiful heart.” (Hafiz: Medieval Persian poet)

• If you drink the Kool Aid long enough, you start to think it’s water.

• March boldly toward the destiny that awaits. Or better yet, dance.

  And to your own drumbeat.