Once a month give or take a few hours, like this evening, I get my period, and for about a half-day my senses are on high alert, and a song sung a certain way, or a breeze blown at just the right moment—or a re-binging on the TV show Lost—threatens to unleash a good old fashioned primordial cry.
I watched Lost back when it was on that age-old medium called network television, and was recently inspired to roll through it again on Netflix. It’s still incredible beyond words.
And it helped me draw a propitious parallel:
Before the Island John Locke was a poor and pitiful excuse for a human life. He had no courage to stand up for himself, no sense of identity or self-worth, allowing himself to be belittled by friends, colleagues, even his own father. And he accepted this because he saw himself as worthless and not deserving of anything good in his life.
The moment he reached the Island he was transformed; suddenly he saw the good in himself making him see all the good around him; he took charge of his own destiny, choosing no longer to be influenced by what others said to him, or how others viewed him; every decision he made was made because he, John Locke, truly believed in it.
He was free.
What's a life worth living? I'm not entirely sure but I can tell you what it will never be for me: A life based on anyone else’s terms or expectations. At the end of my days when I look back at what I've accomplished I intend to measure success by what I gave to the world using my own heart and my own hands, free of any other influence, because it felt honest in the moment, or it felt beautiful, or it just felt like Truth. What anyone else thought was really none of my business.
I leave you with words from the great Mama Cass:
Make your own kind of music;
Sing your own special song;
Make your own kind of music;
Even if nobody else sings along.
