The Grasshopper Sunday Edition

Writing and living for the moment

Photo by Huper by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

We’re All Walking Timebombs

And we don’t know when we are going to go off

That’s not a bad thing, or it is, but it’s reality. But I often wonder whether most people even think about it. I know I don’t, at least not all the time. 

Now, we all know the cliches. Live for the moment. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Remember that one? How about today is the last day of the rest of your life?

No, I didn’t think so. There’s no posters or t-shirts for that one. But if there was, I might wear one, at least when I was feeling provocative. It might start a few conversations. Though I don’t wear slogans or logos if I can avoid it.

Sometimes when asked what I do and I say I’m a writer, I get a response like this: oh, I always wanted to be a writer, or, good for you, how’s that going? It’s a fair question but the implication is there. Can you really make a living doing that?

You can, but that is only a part of why you are doing anything risky. I don’t think money or success are what drive people to take risks or do marginal things. When you read interviews with people with these kinds of passions they are always shocked if they can make their passion work on practical levels.

But, even you are following a passion, you need to be thinking about that ticking bomb and start considering how to shape a decent life around it. Of course I’d love to make the big bucks as a writer, but I also know that, like a lot of things, it is a crapshoot. However I do need to make a living.

But my living or rather, my conception of making a living, is not grandiose. I adapted that part of my life to make being a writer possible. It often means my vacations are less lux, but no less interesting, just different.

My time bomb has no problem with that, in fact it is indifferent because it doesn’t know its timer setting either. 

Carlos Castaneda, who was allegedly an anthropologist* who wrote a best selling series of books recounting his apprenticeship to a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, was told by his teacher that he must live as though death were behind him ready to tap him on the shoulder at any time.

He may or may not have been a charlatan, but that one rings true to me. In fact, it was only one of many lessons in those books that stressed that life is now, not tomorrow. I walked away from a career as a software executive because it felt like I was living for some future life. So, I quit and bought a cross country train trip.

The trip was a rough one, something I was not expecting. It was dark and cold outside in many places and I ran into homeless people everywhere. The train was great but my lack of planning meant I spent a lot of the trip exhausted from a lack of sleep.

But it was a memorable experience I see as a pivotal moment. I took a leap and found myself in an unexpected experience, but it was a real experience lived in real time. And I came out of it having decided that going forward, my living had something to do with my writing.

No regrets. 

*Castaneda’s story is a fascinating one. There are two schools of thought on him. The first, which was accepted as fact, was that he was a graduate student in anthropology who studied Yaqui Indian sorcery under a shaman named Don Juan in Mexico, starting in the nineteen sixties. He wrote a series of books chronicling his years long apprenticeship to Don Juan, which were huge best sellers and extremely compelling to those like me who were messing with alternate reality back then while trying to survive adolescence.

As a writer, I am fascinated by his approach to these books. Each appeared in succession and we saw his understanding of that world change as his knowledge grew. Each seemingly refuted the previous one, which was a great tactic for ensuring readers would keep buying the books as they came out.

But they got increasingly weird until they were almost incomprehensible. And his peers began to question if any of it was actually true, some going so far as to claim he was an outright charlatan who made it all up. There is some evidence of that.

But one of the alleged teachings was that he had to ‘erase his past’, eliminating all evidence of his existence to the point of forgetting his own name, something that was pretty hard to do when you were selling millions of books.

But Carlos, or whoever he was, did a pretty good job of disappearing. He gave few interviews and there were stories that he had a small group of followers who were pursuing that weird stuff in the later books, basically attempting to leave this reality.

There is no clarity around what happened to him, but several of his followers disappeared into the Mojave desert in Southern California.

I am mixed about this writer and these books, which retain a powerful influence on me as a storyteller and a person. If he did make them up, he was a master storyteller. They contain many moments of luminescent beauty and mystery. But they are so compelling I question how he could have made them all up and why he would.

And I guess we will never really know. And maybe that was the plan.