They say that to know you’re there, you need an echo, a reflection of your own presence — some kind of feedback loop.
While that may be true, to know you’re there you also need to move beyond the echoes and reflections that have defined you for too long. You need to reinvent yourself. Fail to do so and you become a recording, an etching frozen in time, forever unable to change.
Risky move, wrong, the wrong kind of risky, the risky kind of wrong. If you’re going to settle into form, into a regular beat, make sure you’ve achieved something, that the bulk of your life is behind you and that you’ve nothing else to give. Set yourself up for posterity too soon and you not only sell yourself short, you become easily dated, just another cry that wasn’t strong enough to become a statement.
Life is full of windswept cries and indiscriminate calls. To know you’re there you need a mirror, a reflection of your own being. The trace of your activity. More importantly, you need the desire to transcend it. A reflection is only as valuable as your willingness to shatter it and see beyond it, into what was invisible, unimaginable, concealed from sight, inconveniently novel and unnervingly challenging.
To know you’re there you need to stay clear of the idols on the wall. Disregard the old and tired narratives, the sclerotic and constipated feedback loops. The dead ends of atavism, let them fall away, and blow up what lies ahead, and behind, and on either side of your advance, whatever closes in on you like calcified rain. Wash away the mold, dissolve the accumulating sediment, breach the walls and smash the barriers with a crash that brings everything down like a mirror, shards flying and hissing in the air, tearing flesh and sinew, revealing the planes unfolding behind what was once proof that you existed.
There, behind the mirror, you will find your essence waiting for you to catch up with yourself, pointing you down the effervescent path.
Move forward and meet it, take the leap, and never look back, never mind the echoes beckoning you to stay put. Their terror is to be expected, sirens wailing, wailing to warn you of imminent danger, only it’s their existence on the line, not yours. They’re terrified to see you find your own voice, to see you develop eyes and ears for something other than them — these entitled distortions that dominated your existence for so long. They came to define you to such an extent, you ended up defining them in turn, and now that you’re moving ahead, they’re disturbed. They don’t want anything to change. They want you to keep bouncing off the same walls, drawing the same picture, living out the same day, the same winter day in Punxsutawney, fulfilling their spectral, derivative purpose.
Move ahead and never mind the sirens, never mind their beckoning calls. Let them holler and scream, let them cry and laugh and perform their entire repertoire, until they fade in the distance and the only thing you can hear is the sound of your own voice, bouncing off the landscape ahead of you. Let the shadows and reflections negotiate the unfolding surroundings, making themselves visible to you, letting you know you’re there, far away from where you started.
To know you’re there you need an echo. To know you’re present you need a rejuvenated feedback loop to wash away the old narratives, something to reboot your vision and offer you a new perspective on life. You need a new mission, something that makes you tick, something that immerses you in setups that understand what drives you and urge you on, reinforcing your advance. You need all that and more, to know you’re there, on the effervescent path enroute to somewhere else.
Intrigued? Watch this space for more.
From the collection of writings EON: THE ANGRY COMING OF AGE