Experience

“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” 
― Jorge Luis Borges

This is a great quote and a greater idea.

I’ve long had a similar philosophy developed during high school if not before when I was consuming philosophy books and studying metaphysics. The idea was an attempt to find meaning in life, yeah, just the kind of thing an angsty teenager would need to figure out. Actually, the very thing. Anyway, the idea was that we were set upon the earth to gain experience. That was it. The truth I lighted on was to live and notice living as much as possible.

I actively pursued this goal, trying new things, feeling the indestructibility of youth and the certainty of progress for a long time. I was called a risk taker, not because I put myself in physical danger, but because I put myself in psychic danger by leaving the country for a year as a senior, switching jobs when they no longer interested me (see Tony Flaner) and, yes occasionally, putting myself in some danger with long camping trips or questionable chemicals.

I was fearless for the longest time and I think it did me good.

I'm not longer fearless, or as fearless as I was. I got squashed here and there, was betrayed more often than I care to remember and lost some of my pluck. I lost people to distance, time and death. I fell into a rut. My courage slipped to fear as my aura of invulnerability dissipated. I got pneumonia. My knees weakened, memory slacked, finances got scary. I retreated a little.

But through all of it, I tried to pay attention.

Today I sit on the verge of another adventure, one again of my own choosing. It’s a simple thing, a move—a hellish, complicated, expensive, hard, down-sizing move, and while my back aches from boxing and my calendar runneth over with handyman visits and shinglers, there is a definite part of me watching it all and recording it.

I’m collecting experience.

It makes me—a writer, an artist, a conscious human being.

Life.

Another favorite quote of mine.

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go."
—The Waking, by Theodore Roethke