What have I been doing all day – or all night for that matter? It looks like a lot of nothing to others, doesn’t it? I’m not writing so much lately. What I do is work on building a brand and fan base. It is a unpaid job for now and I do it for several hours each day, investing time and effort in the future, my dreams.
I’m building a fan base for other authors as well in my role as a publicist. Since none of my activities is paying a dividend at this point, I’m also looking for a job. I devote a good portion of each day looking for something I can do to make money. That is the same trap it has always been in my past. The lure of practical necessity, having to choose between surviving and living, is what each of us faces. It’s the way of the world.
What we do when we chase dreams is come into direct conflict with the practical side of the world. Only a few make it because its easy to become discouraged and listen to the naysayers and critics. They call us dreamers and misfits. To them we are nuts. They need to validate their own life choices urging us to give up and buy into the commonly held belief. They tell us the world is of limited resources and wealth and surviving is the constant struggle to seek your share of the wealth. Those who subscribe to that notion lack the vision necessary to overcome the struggle as well as the misery and suffering around them. And so they succumb too it. They trade in their dreams for practicality’s sake. Instead of focusing on their aspirations with greater resolve and determination, the let the weight of the world crush them into submission. The end result is that most people fail because they don’t have faith that they will intimately succeed if only they persevere.
There is a way if you want to find it and never give up.
No one says it’s easy to make it as an artist or a writer or anything else that involves using your creativity. How crazy are you to actually believe you can conjure something form nothing as if it were magic? Yet, some people do exactly that. They’re different than the norm, though, aren’t they?
Within each of us is a spark that has survived for however long we have lived. It continues until it expires. It is life. And through that we connect to the source and origin that is also our essence. Those around us who seem dull, lifeless and defeated have not lost their spark but have, instead, lost their way. The connection is concealed. It is clouded over with doubt and despair borne of defeat and the criticism of others we have accepted.
What is different about an artist is that the source is more readily accessible. It is clear to everyone of us who retain the ‘gift’ from when we were five-years-old and everything about the world was shiny and new, filled with hope and potential. Artists never learn how to become completely and totally adult-minded. We refuse to submit to the routine. At some point in each of our pasts we decided that being an adult is part of the problem that prevents us from achieving our dreams. We are expected to substitute the goals of others in lieu of our potentially greater ambitions of self-actualization.
Artists don’t deal with the adult world in the same way that others do. Although we have friends, family and others around us who constantly remind us of our responsibilities and our places in the world, we selectively filter out what does not strike us as pertinent to reaching our personal goal and vision. Yet, like everyone else we are expected to become mindless automatons. We are cajoled and sometimes coerced into playing the game the way our masters desire, according to the rules they have conceived. They are the wolves who want us to live as good sheep in the herd or are faithful dogs tending to the sheep that they exploit and harvest.
Artists are misfit to the prevalent system because we aren’t good at following arbitrary rules. Like a child, we question everything. Constantly we ask why? We may have acquired the gift of biting our tongues so that we can hold down a job, but the very reason we are artistic means we don’t fit in with the masses in larger, collectively accepted delusion that the world is an imperfect place.
So, for several hours each day I fill out job applications to serve roles that are functionally necessary for my basic survival. Yet, I don’t want to return to the shuffling madness that used to be my frustrated, self-destructive life. I’ve played that song and danced that jig but never truly benefitted from the experience save for graining some perspective on the way things work and how others endure the depression of their existences.
Something more than the mind numbing entertainment of the media is what I desire from life. What happens to the Kardashians or who won the big game last night could not interest me less. I’ll see something about those things on the Web, I suppose, provided I care to waste my time reading about it. The world does not hang in the balance of something as trivial as the scripted make-believe or surrogate reality of television. By the way, who write that nonsense? Hmmm?
A couple of years ago I set out on a journey to write of alternatives and possibilities in a world of dreams and fantasies that exist beneath the veils of grand deception and mass hysteria that we have collectively decided is real. I’ve never given up and I don’t care to do so now when I am closer to the goal than I was two years ago. I’m not convinced the practical side of the world was ever worthy of my undivided attention. But I continue to play the game as necessary. I can be a good sheep or a good dog same as anyone else. But in the background, the dream continues. It’s always the same.
Then, again, I’m an artist, so what do I know?
The One & Only Elgon 