There is no reward.

Perhaps it isn't about a reward. Perhaps it is just about the sheer tenacity of showing up. Perhaps it is about drumming the same effort, day after day, in dogged pursuit. Perhaps it is about just showing up for your part of the work everyday and getting back up and doing it again the next day. Perhaps it is all about the daily push and trudging. Maybe in trudging there is courage to never give up, strength to keep showing up even when things seem to be falling apart.

We hung out around the wooden table, sitting on our plastic chairs, smoking and playing cards. This guy showed up, he looked a lot like Adam Duritz. He was with an older man and two women. He had an air of familiarity. He answered calls all business-like as he dealt the cards. He lit a joint which we shared, passing around the table. He started talking about some Nazi supremacy agenda conspiracy theory. I thought it sounded like nonsense and had the urge to leave. I left, retired to my room. The next day, the old wise one Rico confirmed it. He is clever, too clever for his own good and sometimes talks nonsense which people buy. I didn't buy it, something in my skin told me this is that much bullshit I needed to get away from. I was glad that once again, I made sense, even when I didnt.

But I must stop living as if it is for other people.

I must stop doing things just because I think others would approve, and start doing things regardless of what people think. I must stop shifting my life around fear - fear of what people think, fear of failure, fear of being vulnerable. Because, true - while this is how you have lived your whole life - while you have been wired to drop your eyes and your gifts at the gaze of others... your tomorrows are wide open. They have not yet been written. And if you do not set yourself free, you will die in fear.

This fear has caused your life to be a trap. It has caused you to be lonely. It has caused you to be inefficient, unproductive. It has caused you to enter depraved, desperate relationships. It has caused you to be self-destructive. It has caused you to shift your feet, head hanging low, under the weight of a big black cloud. It has caused you to be silent when you should have been speaking out. It has caused you to tie your arms down when you were moved to act. It has caused you to be deeply, deeply unhappy. Deeply unsettled. It has caused you to engineer everything you've had the urge to attempt to stay small, to stay below the radar; it has caused you to crumble and bolt the moment the opportunity for greater things appeared.

If you keep shifting your life around these lines of fear, you will die unfulfilled.

Re-set yourself. SPEAK. SING. WRITE. DANCE.

DARE. Make DARE your motto, not 'what if''. DARE, and fail, maybe, but the DARING is success in itself. It is Courage itself. It is what 'DOING' is made of. the DARE to fail. the DARE to move inch by inch, the DARE to come within reach, and breathe, of making something happen.

But life is decidedly a charmed thing. Nothing is solid, nothing is one. Everything shifts and layers.  It is a mish mash of neat blocks of ambition scattered with messes of dreams and fears and failures. Because people are decidedly complex. We exist in shifting shapes. I am the calm exterior before 30 children. I am the crumbling mess that refuses to come out of bed, wanting to shut the world off.  I am the kind mother. I am the angry lover who would join a game of hurting each other. I am a pure soul who wants to do good. I am the jealous cheater who would in one swipe, live in destruction of everything I am trying to build. Grappling, grappling on the edges.