Lately I’ve been through a rough patch that if I’m honest really started three years ago when I left Port Lavaca to return to Chicago, the place of my birth and honestly some place that although I will always love the way you can only love ‘home,’ I wish I never had to return to.

At the time, my writing was going well, I had an adopted family of sorts and although I did not see it then, I was generally content. There were niggles and wiggles and moans to be sure, but as the old saying says, I did not know what I had till it was gone.

I rode those wicked waves till now, waiting on a disability case and battling demons from deep in my psyche.

However, despite my ongoing hardships, I have learned many life lessons. The one I will share with you today is one I hope everyone who reads this will be touched by.

Since 2006, my writing, although not exactly making me rich, has offered one gift which has no price tag: The gift of accepting your passions no matter what comes out of the sweat and effort you put into them.

More than that though, so much more than that…

The respect and awe of myself, but not the grumpy old thirty-seven year old me with the bad wheels and bad past, but the five year old me that peeks out from behind my eyes.

If I was to tell that little kid that he would be a reporter for a newspaper for an all to brief period of five months he would have been ecstatic.

Given the opportunity to impart to him that his name would be on the cover of a book with Doctor Who on it, he would probably go wide eyed and laugh a laugh most of us have forgotten how to long ago.

Because to him it was never about money, fame or all those other silly things we chase. To him it was all about the art, the passion and the pure joy of being involved with subjects he loved.
Van Gough hardly sold any of his paintings in his lifetime and died a ridiculed man with severe depression. And if the first Ghostbusters film taught us anything, it was that Einstein did his best work while he was a patent clerk.

Because it is not about what the TV has us lusting after; it is not about what our peers think of us still playing our music into our forties, and it is certainly not about what others tell you you need to be happy or content.

Now, somewhere in all of us, whether you are sixteen or sixty, this child still lives on.

He or she has no care for the ‘real world’ we must toil in, no interest in politics nor the pain of grown up thoughts, worries and decisions.

He only wants to play in the sun and smile, to dream a little longer, to stay outside to watch the sunset and he only sees the positive and good in the world, despite bumps and roadblocks that appear on his path. Especially in this supposedly recovering economy.

We can embrace this child though, in date nights with our lovers and fishing trips with our friends. We can love him when we engage our passions and show him that although we are indeed striving to achieve adult success, we still have time to get on the floor with him and play, to let our imaginations take the cold gray reality and make it come alive with color and promise.

After all, did not he or she know way more about living ‘life’ than we ever can claim to do now?