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I’m changing up the number to match the date, so as to end on 30 instead of 22 (2 days off per week). So this was day 12 and it was another good and another strange day. I think the best thing about this challenge so far is for me to get to see that baby steps are not a bad thing. As I type that, I get scared, feeling that I’m going to die, and if I just take baby steps all the time, I won’t get “far enough” by the time I die. I write that because it’s honestly how I feel, but I release that feeling, for 3 very good reasons.

1) There is no such thing as death. I don’t fully get this. It’s nice and glib and easy to say, but at the same time, when I do leave this body it is likely that I won’t remember this incarnation. There is a sadness in that to me. I have spent much of this incarnation collecting experiences and knowledge and opinions and perspectives that will one day just vanish, in a sense, as though they never existed. I mean, of course they will in some small way make their impact on the soul, but it will be in such a small and intangible way that from an analytical perspective, you really could almost say it never happened. I just want to state publicly that I am not fully at ease with that, that there is still some longing for permanence, for something to hold on to. It makes me want to cry when I really fully take in that it’s just ever changing and that the metaphor of floating is more apt for what we are all doing than the metaphor of traveling on a path. It feels to me at the same time that my journey is all of our journeys and that as this fucking tsunami of transformation washes over us faster and faster and faster and faster and we are pulled closer and closer and closer and closer to this attractor that we are being sucked into, we are all learning this in our own ways. That the only reason to live in the moment, to be here now, to be present, is because it’s all there is. The rest (i.e. past and future) was a little fear-based mind game and we were all a bunch of fear-based insane people playing the same fear-based insane mind game convincing each other of the importance and necessity of said game.

2) Baby steps add up like compound interest. I do an exercise sometimes that I randomly made up where I look 5 years into the future and ask my future self for advice. The advice is invariably to be excited and to be secure in knowing that everything I am doing really is leading me where I want to go, and to be patient and to enjoy the process and to stop as much as is humanly possible and smell the flowers. Make it all about smelling the flowers because before you know it, it will have slipped through your hands.

3) I’m never going to get far enough anyway. I have a feeling that there are very few people, especially creatively ambitious people, who ever die feeling like they said it all. I imagine for most, they were in the middle of some new discovery, some new breakthrough, and that this is how life works on all levels and on all dimensions. You never get it done, there’s always new and exciting ways to grow, and no matter how you change forms, this will always be the case.

So anywho, back to the old challenge. Today was a super-duper weird day biologically speaking. I think I went to bad “last night” around 2AM and didn’t fall asleep for a good 4 or 5 hours, as is often the case. And then I slept for a loooong time and woke up around 6PM. Then the voice said “don’t go perform, call your friend” so I called my friend and she took me out to a nice dinner and we caught up and talked aliens and after effects and channeling and directing. She also taught me a meditation about bringing in the muses. Basically, you visualize going to your safe space and making a bonfire and dancing all crazy around the bonfire and throwing all of your resistances into the fire and dancing until you collapse and then calling in the muses to fill you up.

The idea is that creativity is expendable and that oftentimes, artists use struggle to get their next fix of creativity. But there are other ways. Such as this meditation. So then I walked back home and the voice said “don’t go perform, go do the meditation” so I meditated for about an hour and then the voice said “go lie down” and I promptly fell asleep even though I had only been up a few hours. Then I woke up and the voice said “go perform.” Mind you, this is 3AM. So I listened to the voice, scared as usual, and went and performed. I got up the cojones to put out my free hugs sign and I had music this time, for the first time, thanks to my brand new iPhone speakers (HIGHLY recommended. they are super awesome and have a 7-hour rechargeable battery built-in!) . So I danced for about 2 hours and no one hugged me but one guy tipped me SIX DOLLARS! And so I made $6.10. Another guy who has a production company gave me his card (at 4:40AM) and wants to shoot me on a blue-screen which I think I will actually take him up on for some projects I have in mind.

So it’s now 7AM and I think I’ll just stay up and go back out at 10:30. With the $4.10 profit I made up, I’m going to buy a baguette and some butter, a mighty fine meal by any standards.

I had another thought while I was in a daze after my meditation. I often find myself complaining (mostly internally) about my lot in life, about how I don’t have “a lot” of money (tell that to Chinese sweatshop workers my dear boy), how other people blah blah blah, and I realized, truly for the first time, that this is all my choice. I really am choosing all of this. For some reason, it never dawned on me that if I really put my mind to it, with my skills as a writer and marketer and video editor and web designer and graphic designer and visual effects person and musician and e-commerce and web video and general creativity and likability (and lickability), I could likely find a job for, let’s say $80,000 a year.

And I don’t want to. I’d rather be taking my $4 profit from dancing in the subway for 2 hours at 3AM and buying a baguette. I love this life. This is the life I always dreamed of. I never knew if I could pull it off, and to be honest, I still don’t, but here I am, believing or not believing, and I’m pulling it off, right now, in the present moment, as I speak. So I just want to give thanks for that and to remember that this is all by choice, including all the struggle and all the fear and all the hardship. What fun is a rollercoaster if it don’t make you scream?

[And I’m sure within a week I’ll be complaining again! I don’t even mind affirming that ]

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