Richard Stupart

To choose forever between following a distant star or trading with the devil for a lesser truth. This, above all else, is the decision with which we must live.

Strange days indeed. But breezily refreshing to the big questions. The ones that matter. A friend who knows where her heart would lead her – half way across the planet to another life. Another who cannot seem to find a place in this world of pursuits, of endless jostling and comparison. And my own most fundamental challenge to, in carefully planned time, begin to live consistently with what I believe of the world. To live in defiance of the order that raised me. Taking what I have become and denying it my obedient payback.

When we are young, we are idealistic. It’s what we do.  Thinking about what if’s. Questioning the most fundamental views of what truly must be and choosing for ourselves. When you are young, those dreams cost nothing. So many years ahead. So few reasons to compromise. It makes those dreams, those visions of ourselves beautiful, unencumbered.

Then the world introduces itself to you. It makes demands of you. Of your time. Of your plans. And, ultimately, of your dreams. Those best beliefs of yourself seem uncommon in the lives-as-lived of the world. They don’t belong. Filled with untested courage, they were a distant reflection of you far beyond the tame, beyond the known. There can be no order in a world saturated with the colours of billions of freely-pursued dreams. It’s a little too much like anarchy. That the world can function another day, you – as all those before you – will be offered that grandest of deals.

Change your plans from best to enough.

Stop questioning whether your money, your house, your responsibilities to the system will mean anything to you on your death.

Give the world the colours of your dreams and wave a dead goodbye to the possibility of yourself that you fell in love with when you dreamed. And for this price, if you give your energies to the pull of others who dream in grey, you will probably never be left behind. You will have the esteem of friends, of a community in which you finally have a place. You will have a house, safety and a life whose success and meaning few will question.

It will be a good life, but for the quiet moments you will avoid as best you can. The ones where not even the humming voice of the world will reach you.

It will be a good life, but for the quiet moments you will avoid as best you can. The ones where not even the humming voice of the world will reach you. When, alone again with only yourself, you will appreciate the true cost of your contract.

Seeing all you could have been – the energy you so almost projected into the world. The person you wanted to be so badly it hurt – the self you loved most. You would give anything for the raw, lived beauty of that life. Anything except what the world has given you – an attachment from whose fundamental agony you will never free yourself.

So I scream to you through these words a truth more important than your wealth, your life, your ego. Do not, not ever, make that bargain. Choose to live. To face all of the weather of life and seek, always seek, that life you so loved, that so inspired. Where that path is forbidden, leave the world that forbids it. Where you must be different, face danger, cry tears, do so. Do so with the joyous resolve that whatever the world will never understand about you, it will – in anger and in envy – be forever unable to deny the one, singular truth

that you lived.