Smart Rules: Canaries and Alligators

The trouble with everything costs something is that you can only experience one set of consequences: the decision tree branches, you pick one or the other, and the not-chosen branch dies quietly.  Schrodinger’s Cat, once examined, is either one or the other.  You don’t get to play both out.

I have a supervisor.  My supervisor finds me disrespectful.  I find him intellectually incurious, and therefore limited as a manager of people.  You have to be interested in perspectives other than your own to manage effectively.  His response to my perceived disrespect has been distinctly bullyish.  I spoke up for myself.  And here we arrive at the rule for being smart for the day:

Don’t write a check with your alligator mouth that is going to break your canary ass.

I’m not saying that’s where I am.  Everything costs something: speaking up in your own defense is expensive.  Keeping quiet comes with its own expenses, and the truth is that, more often than not, the person who makes a problem known becomes the problem child and not the person who caused the problem.  Speaking up makes people uncomfortable.  Everyone would rather you do the safe thing, the comfortable thing, and talk bad about the schmuck, wreak havoc with everyone’s morale, complain bitterly and quietly, and then find another job.  The clean answer, the direct answer, raising your hand and saying no, this isn’t going to go down like this…

Both options have their costs.  The one is up front and immediate.  The other is a bit like paying by credit card.  Sure, you think that paying a little bit over time is easier on your finances, but one day you wake up like most Americans with $15,000 on the Visa and 22% APR, wondering how you could have ever been so stupid and what on earth you have to show for the debt.

There is no clear answer here.  In my case, Schrodinger’s Cat is dead and I don’t know how things would have played out if I hadn’t stood up to the bully, because I did, and now I’m the problem child.

Everything costs something.  There are times when that is both a certainty and a comfort.  I would have been paying for this anyway… at least that’s what I tell myself.  Besides.  I’m not sure I was constitutionally capable of keeping my mouth shut.  So there is that to consider as well.

Canaries and alligators.  Make sure your back end matches your front end before you assert yourself.  That’s all.

Ebola

Writing, at least for the past month+, has involved intensive research and writing on the subject of Ebola, or more specifically, Ebola in West Africa.  I know more about Ebola than I ever wanted to know.  It is one of those subjects that exposes everything wrong with our media.

First of all, the general tenor of the media reporting has had a distinct flavor of “those uneducated, backwards brown people.”  Do any reading at all, and you’d think that the “traditional burial practices” involve rolling around with the dead person, propping them up in the corner and sitting on their lap like Santa Clause.  Here are your traditional burial practices:  wash the body, have a funeral to which the entire community is invited and at which family and friends are likely to touch the deceased, and bury the body.

What of this is so different than the way we bury people here?  Okay, so we farm out the washing to the mortuary, where they suck out all of the fluids and replace them with chemicals, then paint up the body so it approximates life.  Then we have funerals, and I’ve been to several.  People touch the body here and kiss the forehead here too.  And then the body is buried.  If my mom had died of Ebola, I would have caught it.  I touched her as she was laying in the hospital, I touched her after she died.  The problem isn’t cultural nuances, it is that someone who dies of Ebola is more contagious after they’ve died, so any contact at all is a risk for transmission.  Yet and still, the bodies must be buried.

Second, you’d think that pervasive ignorance was to blame for the magnitude of the spread of this Ebola outbreak.  No mention of abject, grinding poverty.  No discussion of corrupt governments, the legacy of civil war, not enough doctors, health clinics with too little staff, no supplies…  Nope, those backwards brown people.

And then, if that wasn’t enough, the narrative about how the western world – the “international community” – intervened with education, contact tracing, safe burials, and proper care protocols, and saved the day.  Clearly, money made a huge difference.  Money, supplies, doctors, etc.  And yes, education was required.  All of that required resources…  Ebola had never been seen in West Africa before.  But West Africans did a hell of a lot to save themselves too.  And the idea that learning was a problem doesn’t hold water, because the same report that hints at ignorance and intractability also points out that stigma and fear of Ebola lead to healthcare workers being ostracized and threatened with violence.

Get into the story and it’s fair to say that Ebola in West Africa was a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and will continue to be felt for a long time.  Ebola is terrifying, but what about the fact that kids who didn’t get vaccinated because the whole system fell apart over Ebola are now at risk for dying for measles at a rate equal to the number of Ebola deaths?  Yeah.  Bet the media isn’t going to have histrionics about *that.*

So yes.  I know more about Ebola than I ever wanted to know.  And I’m incredibly grateful that I haven’t had to watch anyone I love die of it.  And the Ebola orphans make me want to quit everything and just go hug children in Africa.  And I hate how stupidly, structurally colonial and racist the media is.

That is all.

What You Wish For

These grand thoughts seem to happen fairly regularly in the shower…  Seriously, before the invention of the shower, where did people go to have their grand thoughts?  It is entirely foofy, but I want to believe water is some superconductor between a body and the Universe.  I was standing there in the dark and I realized that I am the thing I wanted to be when I grew up.

It doesn’t look like what I thought it would look like.  At sixteen, I saw myself standing on a cliff in a black skirt on a walk with four dogs after a long day writing and teaching.  It doesn’t look like that.  There aren’t many cliffs in DC and I don’t wear black Stevie Nicks skirts to work most days.  My teaching duties are more “other duties as assigned” than they are classroom with chalk.

But I am a writer.  I write books, though that doesn’t pay me nearly enough to survive on.  I write reports – I’m currently up to my eyes in Ebloa, which I will wax eloquently about later.  And I only have one dog.  It isn’t the way I thought it would be – these things never are, but it *is* what I wished for.  After a fashion.  I’m incredibly lucky…  loads of people are still looking for where they belong, or making intolerable compromises.  There are things I don’t like about my work – I don’t like it when the experts come in and muck up the flow and rhythm of my paragraphs.  There is nothing about technical or scientific writing that says it can’t have a flow or that every sentence must start with “the.”  And I get frustrated when I can’t fix it because the expert on Ebola trumps the (more-or-less) expert on words.

So no, it isn’t perfect.  But perfect would be boring – we all need something to squawk about.  Still, it’s kinda sorta what I wished for…

Drinks

I don’t know what to tell people.

How were your holidays?

Um.  Not that great.

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

What happened?

My mom died.

Like not everyone needs to know this, I understand.  But I also just don’t have much in me for polite conversations.  I want to be left alone with what happened.  I don’t do well at small talk under the best of circumstances, but now small talk seems particularly burdensome.  Don’t these people know that I’m in the middle of something?

Of course they don’t.

Someone at work suggested we go out for a drink.  I said no.  My mom died.  I don’t want to do anything.  Maybe not ever.

A Day in the Life

Really, I just want to show off the hat and my dog…

http://www.ladiesdc.org/blog-categories/a-day-in-the-life-of-audrey-reid-

 

The People Problem

You think your job is widgets.  It isn’t.

Your job is people.  Somewhere along the way, maybe when we stopped growing our own potatoes (and even then, there was family to manage), the output stopped being 100% of the point.  Not that output doesn’t matter.  Not that you don’t touch widgets.  But I’m willing to bet that for 99% of people, their daily work isn’t taken up in units moved from the inbox to the outbox.

Nope.  The bulk of your day is spent in people, nurturing relationships, building influence, listening, talking, arguing, managing feelings, going around so-and-so…  Because work is a social enterprise.  It is the primary social enterprise, given the death of small communities and the waning influence of churches.  It’s where we talk to people, it’s where we express ourselves.  It is the venue that excuses our runway walk through the world with this pair of shoes instead of that, this haircut, this beard, this dress, all of which say to people “this is who I am.”

Let’s face it, you don’t worry about all of that when you work from home, you don’t have to tell the dog who you are.  He can figure that out by sticking his nose in your butt.

Economies are changing.  Everything is changing.  From an input/output perspective measured in widgets, our system for working is super inefficient – because of the people.  People are the problem.  At least from one perspective.

From another perspective, we need our work.  Even the jobs we hate, and not just for the paycheck. We need our work because we are social animals.  We need the connection and it is harder and harder to find elsewhere.

To our detriment.

Stories in the Closet

Some other time I’ll have to see if I can come up with a cogent, reasoned basis for my starting point: our lives are governed by the stories we tell.  We start with the basic building-blocks–genetics, brain structure/chemistry, parents, society, culture, language – and we come up with a story that is our identity.  No, it isn’t all choices.  You don’t chose the color of your skin or your parents propensity to read to you.  But you choose the story you tell, and that story gets told in every choice you make.  From what we read to what we put in our closets, all of these things work together to express our story about who we are – our identities.  

It is the question of appearance as a collection of choices designed to tell a story that I’d like to talk about.  Mark Cuban is in the news for talking about his prejudices when it comes to young men in hoodies and anyone with a face tattoo, but I don’t think the negative press is fair.  We’re all engaged in a social contract.  Unless you live in monkish isolation all alone in a cave next to a snow leopard in the Himalayas, you are a part of the social contract.  In any interaction, there are two people and they both bring something to the table.

Let’s get the Trayvon Martin sticking point out of the way.  At no point did Mr. Cuban say he would be justified in shooting a young man in a hoodie.  He said he would cross the street.  I don’t care what you’re wearing or how you choose to present yourself or what falls out of your mouth, no one should be shot over someone else’s prejudices.

Hoodies are a part of the sartorial lexicon for a number of cultural subgroups.  It is a choice in clothing that means something:  If you’re in Silicone Valley, the hoodie is a badge of belonging in the ranks of hackers and programmers.   In London, a hoodie was uniform for the riots in 2011. With this item of clothing, I would imagine that much depends on whether the hood is up or down.  At least in my own perception – as a hoodie-wearer when I’m not pretending to be a grown up at work – hood down is something entirely different than hood up.

We’re social creatures navigating with the evolutionary tools that kept us alive for millennia: the ability to make quick judgement about what is safe and what isn’t, an intuitive understanding of how to project invincibility like a puffer-fish under attack, and the ability to camouflage ourselves to go undetected and unpunished.    Every day, we make choices that navigate those social constructs.  We know that we will be judged by the way we present ourselves and we react accordingly.

Unless it’s cold or raining, a hood-up hoodie is functionally unnecessary, therefore  whether the hood is up or down is a choice to project a message.  It may be the equivalent of a dog with it’s hackles up – don’t mess with me, I’m bigger than you – but it is a choice that telegraphs something intentional to anyone looking at you.  To deny that is insupportable.

Mr. Cuban also pointed out facial tattoos.  Let’s be honest.  Unless you’re from a Berber (or some other) tribe  that practices facial tattooing as a part of social cohesion, you don’t get your face tattooed to tell people looking at you that you are a conformer who is deeply committed to the social construct.  You just don’t.

It is disingenuous to expect that society not react to the choices you make about how you present yourself.  You make those choices for exactly that reason: you want to send a message about who you are, the story you’ve told about yourself that you want the rest of us to buy.  The messages change – visible tattoos don’t have the same gasp factor inside the bell curve that they used to, and I think that’s a good thing – but the messages don’t go away.  As a part of the social contract, I have a responsibility to understand what is expected within the social group I’m a part of and make my choices accordingly.  It is unreasonable for me to reject the consequences of those choices as being unfair.

If I get a Kat VonD constellation tattoo around my eye, I would be telling my co-workers in the government building I’m in that I wasn’t interested in playing the game they’re playing.  Would I be fired over it?  Probably not.  Would I get the same job if I came to the interview table with that tattoo?  Probably not.  My competence level would be the same, the difference is that I’d be telling the interviewees that I was actively unwillingly to conform to the social norms of the workplace I was in.

And that’s fine, it is my right.  But I can’t send the message to the world that I’m uninterested in playing by societal norms and then be mad when the social group (family, friends, work, public transportation, these are all social spaces where people interact) doesn’t want to play with me.

I wear a lot of black.  It’s deliberate.  When I open my mouth, more often than not, I’m memorable.  I want to be able to choose the message I give and when I want to give it.  I want my clothes to be pretty unremarkable.  My hair, my eye shadow, my nail polish, my shoes, when I’m shopping I choose not just on whether or not things fit, I’m shopping for the message I want to send about myself: slightly unknowable, more interesting on the second (and closer) look than she is on the first, and self-contained.  There isn’t a lot of booty hanging out, not much by way of flashy jewelry.  And I’d be straight up full of shit if I tried to say that my closet wasn’t curated to send a specific set of messages.  For good or ill, that message is mine.  It is the story I tell to someone who’s never met me, before I even open my mouth.

It doesn’t include a facial tattoo, because I want to be able to choose when I tell someone I don’t give a shit what they think of me, I don’t want them to know that when they first see me across the street.

So I don’t have a problem with Mr. Cuban reading a message in the hood-up collection of young men walking down the street and getting out of the way.  To suggest that someone not react to the visual clues being sent by other individuals in a social group is to suggest that we can or should wipe out a million years of social evolution.  Unlikely.  I’m not saying don’t get a face tattoo.  Just don’t get one and expect to become the Director of the Office of Personnel Management.  You can’t tell a story about yourself and get mad when other people take you at your word.

When I say everything we do is in accordance with the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, clothing and grooming is included.  When we do something contrary to the story, either the story or the behavior must change.  We don’t do well out of alignment with our own stories (which is why, when looking to change yourself, it helps to start by changing your story about yourself…  either the behavior or the story has to change.  If you’re deliberate about the story, then the behavior follows).  For a good example, check out this video of a homeless man getting a makeover and see it all the way through.

I don’t know Mr. Cuban from a doorpost.  All I’m saying is I’m not buying that he’s a schmuck off of this one interview.

On Writing: Characters

I am sure there are better writers than me who know exactly where their characters come from.  Me, I got no idea.  There are people in my book that I would love to claim, but the truth is that they showed up entirely themselves out of nowhere, and insisted on going their own way.

That being said, I do know where they don’t come from: some kind of autobiographical impulse.  I was at a Q&A session over the weekend with young actors.  Someone posed a question to the group about choosing characters for a one-act play and whether or not there was autobiography in the choice.  I was disappointed to hear the actors say yes.  Okay, so they were young and perhaps it is different for an actor than a writer.  But maybe a writer is just an actor who wants to try on the skin of everyone in the story…  A single character is rarely a portrait of the artist and not every word spoken or action taken by a character corresponds to something the author would do in real life.

(I wonder if anyone ever asks George R. R. Martin whether Cerci or Jon Snow are self-portraits.)

And there is, but not in the way that people think.  People tend to assume the portrait is in a single character, or a character’s experiences.  That’s not how it works.  Characters end up being a way to explore curiosity.  What would it be like to have the kind of mind that is 98% logic?  What flows out of that?  What makes that person tick?  Where did it come from?  How does it impact things that defy logic?  So when Miles takes satisfaction in having a messy problem that he has full permission to straighten out however he sees fit, that’s not me.  That’s not how I’d operate.  But I’m terribly curious about people who do function like that.

So there is a kind of portrait in the entire thing, a commentary on the writer’s value system, but it’s a portrait done by pointillism: if you look too closely, you’ll miss the entire thing.  You’ve got to step back for it to make sense.  And it isn’t going to be who the writer is, but what questions catch their attention and won’t let go, where their curiosities lie, and what they think matters.

Politics of the Worst Possible Sort

I mean office politics. 

Professionally, I’m not for them.  Personally, I wonder what went tragically awry in high school that the workplace has to be the venue for rehashing/reliving it all. 

1. Why is it the people who are most determined to be leaders (and most put out when it doesn’t happen) the people who are least prepared to lead?  Universally, the individuals I’ve come across who want to be in charge so badly it oozes out of every pore are the same people who seem incapable of putting what’s best for the team ahead of their own need for validation/recognition.  If you can’t meet that basic standard – mission/team first, ego second – then you aren’t fit for leadership. 
2. Don’t people realize that snarking and sniping and bitching and moaning eventually come back around to making you look bad?  To quote Hugh McLeod, welcome to Nobody Gives a Shit, population: everyone.
3. Do you think that I won’t notice that you bitch about everyone, which makes the likelihood that you’re going to bitch about me increase about a million-fold? 
4. Boundaries, people.  Boundaries. 
5. Also: Grow up.

I think that’s enough for one day.  I’m going to go back to dreaming about brainwashing the entire world with The Four Agreements.  Take nothing personally.  ( It ain’t about you.)  Be impeccable with your word.  Don’t assume.  Do your best. 

Everything is easier when you make your peace with the fact that it just isn’t about you…  And I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t want to make their daily life just a little easier.

This Isn’t Something I Have to Worry About

At least not yet…

The Catastrophe of Success

by Tennessee Williams

This winter marked the third anniversary of the Chicago opening of “The Glass Menagerie,” an event that terminated one part of my life and began another about as different in all external circumstances as could well be imagined. I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence, and from the precarious tenancy of furnished rooms about the country I was removed to a suite in a first-class Manhattan hotel. My experience was not unique. Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of Americans. The Cinderella story is our favorite national myth, the cornerstone of the film industry if not of the Democracy itself. I have seen it enacted on the screen so often that I was now inclined to yawn at it, not with disbelief but with an attitude of Who Cares! Anyone with such beautiful teeth and hair as the screen protagonist of such a story was bound to have a good time one way or another, and you could bet your bottom dollar and all the tea in China that one would be caught dead or alive at any meeting involving a social conscience.

No, my experience was not exceptional, but neither was it quite ordinary, and if you are willing to accept the somewhat eclectic proposition that I had not been writing with such an experience in mind and many people are not willing to believe that a playwright is interested in anything but popular success—there may be some point in comparing the two estates.

The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.

I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.

I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed. I thought to myself, this is just a period of adjustment. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite above the discreet hum of an East Side boulevard and I will appreciate its elegance and luxuriate in its comforts and know that I have arrived at our American plan of Olympus. Tomorrow morning when I look at the green satin sofa I will fall in love with it. It is only temporarily that the green satin looks like slime on stagnant water.

But in the morning the inoffensive little sofa looked more revolting than the night before and I was already getting too fat for the $125 suit which a fashionable acquaintance had selected for me. In the suite things began to break accidentally. An arm came off the sofa. Cigarette burns appeared on the polished surface of the furniture. Windows were left open and a rain storm flooded the suite But the maid always put it straight and the patience of the management was inexhaustible. Late parties could not offend them seriously. Nothing short of demolition bomb seemed to bother my neighbors.

I lived on room service. But in this, too, there was a disenchantment. Some time between the moment when I ordered dinner over the phone and when it was rolled into my living room like a corpse on a rubber-wheeled table, I lost all interest in it. Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak.

Of course all this was the more trivial aspect of a spiritual dislocation that began to manifest itself in far more disturbing ways. I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable. Sincerity and kindliness seemed to have gone out of my friends’ voices. I suspected them of hypocrisy. I stopped calling them, stopped seeing them. I was impatient of what I took to be inane flattery.

I got so sick of hearing people say, “I loved your play!” that I could not say thank you any more. I choked on the words and turned rudely away from the usually sincere person. I no longer felt any pride in the play itself but began to dislike it, probably because I felt too lifeless inside ever to create another. I was walking around dead in my shoes and I knew it but there were no friends I knew or trusted sufficiently, at that time, to take them aside and tell them what was the matter.

This curious condition persisted about three months, till late spring, when I decided to have another eye operation mainly because of the excuses it gave me to withdraw from the world behind a gauze mask. It was my fourth eye operation, and perhaps I should explain that I had been afflicted for about five years with a cataract on my left eye which required a series of needling operations and finally an operation on the muscle of the eye. (The eye is still in my head. So much for that.)

Well, the gauze mask served a purpose. While I was resting in the hospital the friends whom I had neglected or affronted in one way or another began to call on me and now that I was in pain and darkness, unpleasant mutation which I had suspected earlier in the season had now disappeared and they sounded now as they had used to sound in the lamented days of my obscurity. Once more they were sincere and kindly voices with the ring of truth in them and that quality of understanding for which I had originally sought them out.

As far as my physical vision was concerned, this last operation was only relatively successful (although it left me with an apparently clear black pupil in the right position, or nearly so) but in another, figurative way, it had served a much deeper purpose.

When the gauze mask was removed I found myself in a readjusted world. I checked out of the handsome suite at the first-class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success, a country where vagrants innocent as children curl up to sleep on the pavements and human voices, especially when their language is not familiar to the ear, are soft as birds’. My public self, that artifice of mirrors, did not exist here and so my natural being was resumed.

Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called “The Poker Night,” which later became “A Streetcar Named Desire.” It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable.

For me a convenient place to work is a remote place among strangers where there is good swimming. But life should require a certain minimal effort. You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a hotel corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of Democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else’s mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service.

I have been corrupted as much as anyone else by the vast number of menial services which our society has grown to expect and depend on. We should do for ourselves or let the machines do for us, the glorious technology that is supposed to be the new light of the world. We are like a man who has bought up a great amount of equipment for a camping trip, who has the canoe and the tent and the fishing lines and the axe and the guns, the mackinaw and the blankets, but who now, when all the preparations and the provisions are piled expertly together, is suddenly too timid to set out on the journey but remains where he was yesterday and the day before and the day before that, looking suspiciously through white lace curtains at the clear sky he distrusts. Our great technology is a God-given chance for adventure and for progress which we are afraid to attempt. Our ideas and our ideals remain exactly what they were and where they were three centuries ago. No. I beg your pardon. It is no longer safe for man to even declare them!

This is a long excursion from a small theme into a large one which I did not intend to make, so let me go back to what I was saying before.

This is an oversimplification. One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will not continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—-why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies.

You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own violation— and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!

It is never altogether too late, unless you embrace the Bitch Goddess, as William James called her, with both arms and find in her smothering caresses exactly what the homesick little boy in you always wanted, absolute protection and utter effortlessness. Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were intended to be. Ask, anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about— What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life—live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

I found this re-tweeted by Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) and posted here.