this is the golden age

You want to know what scares people? Success.

Success is a threat. Why should this be? Why are so many willing to forsake their destiny?

It takes courage to fail over and over and over again—and still believe in yourself. To pursue your destiny despite everything and everyone that you will have release along the way, because there are too many people who are embittered and want you to stay by their side and quit, just as they did. And talk ish cause what else is there to do when you do nothing at all. To choose distractions over focus, to choose destruction over creation, to choose emptiness over fulfillment, to never cross the invisible line, to stay in a prison of your own making.

I know this well.

Success scares people because it reminds them of what they gave up for no reason other than they were too scared to take the risk and too cheap to invest in themselves. How easy it is to quit your life before you die, to go through the motions, to settle for a lesser fate. And then they hate all those who do well, forever jealous of the person who had the courage to fail.

Jealousy is the mark of the insecure mind. For anyone you consider a competitor rather than a colleague, you are acknowledging the fact that you see yourself coming up short. And it’s strange, that desire to compete and compare and to put yourself on a hierarchy, as though you could ever understand. What it takes to succeed. And I don’t mean to survive. I mean to thrive, to grow, to flourish, to blossom into a meadow that does not begin and does not end but cycles in seasons, blooming in the spring and dying in the fall and coming around time and again until death takes all.

I keep thinking of this, because a bigger picture slowly reveals itself. Pull back the lens and see life for what it is. A window of opportunity. A chance to live your dream. Because, let’s get real, this is two thousand and twelve. It is the Golden Age. And every Golden Age is the tipping point because waves crest and peak and crash upon the shore and we are riding the bubbly white foam right about now. The time is now, and now is all we have.

Success isn’t easy, but life isn’t for the weak of heart or mind or spirit. And death comes, inevitably. And when it comes, as I have seen, a terror sets in, remorse unlike any other, karma by a lesser name. Last night I was writing in my head, writing the fourth book, and it kept me awake. This story is so dark, and everyone around me is in the deepest kind of denial and why, why would they deny the truth? Except that it means they know they were powerless.

But not I, that has never been me. Power tingles at my fingertips, strange I should use a keyboard to unleash my energies. But it is not by accident that I should write. Because writing is salvation and writing is freedom. And when they are dead, then the story will be told, but before then I do not wait, I have my destiny to uphold.