Adventure: The Freedom to Think

Another conversation with a creative searching for the path forward. The days of the well worn path are long gone. Now we find ourselves at the edge of the Sahara with tracks leading off in all directions. No clear destination. I’m not sure how to answer these questions any longer. “What do we do?” “How do we survive?” Another long-time friend in Los Angeles, someone with a twenty-year, clear cut niche called and said “It’s all gone.” Again, how does one respond to this? I certainly have no answers and left the game a long, long while ago. For this, and many other reasons.

There is a freedom in being left alone with just your thoughts. This is why I spend a lot of time alone, offline. I realize what I have to offer is ideas. I have ideas because I attempt to educate myself about a wide range of subjects that might first appear to be unrelated, but upon further inspection prove themselves to be very much one and the same.

The easiest way out of this is to just say “I don’t know.” And most of the time I don’t. I look at my future as a creative and it doesn’t look anything like what I imagined it would be. My initial career imagination was filled with things that no longer exist. But the real gain is that I don’t see moving away from the creative fields as a bad thing. I see it as a good thing.

My conversation today was about traditional models of creative exchange and how what we knew is longer what we know. Gone. Vanished. Replaced or simply forgotten. What remains, with the community at large, is the desire to be creative, the desire to make one’s living with creativity, and the basic belief that being creative, sharing information, telling stories, shaping how the world sees the world is still important.

I too believe in these things. I do. But I also know most of the world does not, and I do not expect them to suddenly become fans. Is it worth even trying? Sure, it is. It always will be. Always. But the path will grow more faint before it becomes clear. The incline will be steep. The compromise potentially greater. The game more complicated. Ultimately, anyone with the will to create must remain focused on the work itself. In the end, it’s all that matters. I continue to gain knowledge. At least attempting to do do. Then I connect dots. Dots of people, places and things, so that occassionaly, I just might have an answer.