Start Today!

I got an email last week from this lovely girl, asking me why I didn’t write anything about David Bowie, after his death. “You write about pop culture, didn’t you like Bowie, why didn’t you include a piece about him?”, she asked.

Of course I liked Bowie. I loved Bowie. What could I possibly say that would make any sense, comfort anyone? Comfort myself? Bowie was a paradox of creative expression, and with his death, I felt cheated out of much more creation I was owed to experience. I felt selfish.

What can I say about someone getting a cancer & dying? Its such a powerless thing, the one we can not change. What can I say? To talk and reminiscence about his accomplishments, that’s pointless too. Bowie was such trailblazing force, the words are redundant. I'm not a fan of verbalizing the obvious; like the words are almost undermining the fact.

But then someone shared something about Bowie on Facebook, the article on Medium written by Jason Evangelho and it just hit the spot. Specifically the paragraph:

Do not waste any more time not expressing yourself. Say what you need to say, boldly and without reservation. Nurture your creativity and don’t be shy about it. Stop constantly consuming and start creating before it’s too late, and that dark, mysterious wardrobe into nothingness consumes you. Leave your mark. Start today.

Isn’t it hauntingly beautiful? The point of Jason’s piece on Bowie was his last video, Lazarus, and how he views it differently before and after David’s death. Or in his words, how staggering it is how differently a piece of art can be interpreted both before and after someone’s death.

He views Bowie in the video as “overwhelmed, frantically writing so furiously that his hand spills off the page and down the front of his desk. It’s screaming that Bowie had so much left to say. To contribute. To create. But time has run out.”

When I was in school and later college, I irritated people with how much I could do, from sports, to math, to art, to creativity. And then, I just got lost. Was it because the people I was in the relationship with detoured me from my creativity? Or I just got overwhelmed with always trying to be everything to everyone? I became someone totally different, not realizing the creativity is what I am, what gives me purpose. Not money, not even love gives me that much purpose and pleasure as my creativity and building things from the sketch.

When I snapped out of it and started again, it literally saved my life. Right now, I see creating things and putting them into the world to fly, whatever your creations might be - the only absolute purpose in this world. Everything else comes secondary. And when I realized that was my main purpose, I got freaked out about 10 years of missed productivity. I let someone else's dream detour me from mine, and right now, still, I feel the need to do so much more.

And to imagine the situation, as Jason pointed out with Bowie, which was actually the best piece I read about him since the news of death; to imagine the situation where you have so much to create and show and give to the world, weather its the huge scale like Bowie, or a regular, smaller, the one of regular people; to run out of time while you still didn’t give all that you could; there’s absolutely nothing worse.

Nothing worse then being aware how much more you can give to this world, but being prevented from doing it. Blessed are the idiots who live to make money, have no purpose, no creation in life, but to have money and sit, eat, consume, contribute nothing to this world, have no purpose.

And that’s why I find this point of view not depressing, or sad, but actually inspiring and motivating, to wake up, realize we don’t have all the time in the world, to stop procrastinating for next week, next Monday, next year, or even tomorrow; to wake up and DO all the things we always wanted, before we can’t do them anymore.

Again. Because we need to hear this numerous times until it gets in out head -

Do not waste any more time not expressing yourself. Say what you need to say, boldly and without reservation. Nurture your creativity and don’t be shy about it. Stop constantly consuming and start creating before it’s too late. Leave your mark. Start today.

Stop consuming.

Start creating.

Start today!

---------

Image credit / Beauty In Technicolor