Ok. Enough already! Up… down. Confident… insecure. Full of ideas… full of sh*t. Pull the trigger… hold off. They’ll love this… they’ll hate this. Finally I am doing this… I’m too old to do this. They’ll laugh at me!
We are our own worst critics, our own worst enemies. The most proficient builders of thick, tall stone walls. Obstacles to our progress. Behind it all is our caveman instinct of fear. Meant to protect us in danger, it has evolved into a destroyer of joy, of living, of accomplishing. Add to that the relentless bombardment that is our modern world and it’s difficult not to empathize with the mind overwhelmed, the mind unable to clearly work through, break through. But it must.
I have been writing since I was a little boy. I used an old typewriter my father had found and a small stack of onion paper. Inspiration for me came from a large book with a collection of scary short stories. Not very good ones upon reflection, but good enough to inspire me.
I remember writing a play, although I was not aware at the time what a play was. A story that my friends and I spent the day acting out. It was called The Ghost of Skeleton Island. I don’t remember the story at all, but it must have had something to do with a ghost and skeleton on an island. I do remember it entertaining my friends and me for the majority of a day, jerryrigging costumes and masks, acting out each of our parts, so I deemed it a success.
I continued writing throughout my life, although not prolifically. I satisfied my cravings by telling stories endlessly to everyone around me. The stories seemed to entertain. Although I was occasionally mocked for repeating certain stories over and over, they seemed to be welcome or even requested.
As I got older and with a little more free time than in my previous stages of life, I’ve recently written much closer to prolifically than I had ever before. Finding myself with material that had potential for starting to share with others. But one day, I suddenly turned around and found myself facing an impossibly tall, five-foot thick, cold, damp stone wall preventing me from doing so. It had never been there before.
I realized it was a wall I had built clandestinely in my own mind. A wall designed to prevent me from moving forward. Meant to protect me, boy, was that wall well built! We all face these walls built with our own minds. The walls we build prevent us from taking any step forward. For our own protection. Finding a way through these walls is a daunting task, and with the endless distractions in life now, there are abundant excuses to avoid making the effort to figure out how to break through.
This morning, lying in bed, I finally figured out how to overcome the wall. It was obvious, simple, in plain sight. All this time taken to strategize how to catapult myself over the wall, climb over the wall, find a door, walk the length of it to find a way around it, all of that wasted. What I discovered was the key. I was looking for physical solutions to a self-created obstacle, when the solution simply needed to be magical.
Magic is something painfully missing in the world today. Like forgotten books of spells from the Middle Ages, or unexplained miracles of years past. Magic has mostly disappeared from our modern age. I believe that is a reality that we have created ourselves, through complexity, distractions and sensory overload. We simply have destroyed our capacity to see and use magic all around us. But in reality this is something we can change. I thought about the magic I needed to get to the other side of the wall. I concluded that I simply needed to walk through it as if it were not even there.
So this morning, I walked through that wall that has stood before me for months, and I find myself on the other side of it. Standing on a winding gravel road through hilly emerald green fields and forests as far as the eye can see. The sun pierces through shifting clouds, creating magical beams from the heavens, surreal patterns of light on the emerald green ground. Lighting my way.
This is not the end. I have gotten through the wall but have no idea where this gravel path will lead me. It is certain that I will encounter other obstacles or even beasts, some of my creation and some not, on the way to wherever I’m going. This time I move forward with the knowledge that there is a tiny bit of magic that still surrounds us. That still exists in all of us. As we take time to enjoy time with family and friends, we must also take time to contemplate and nurture those magical powers within us and begin to realize the power we have to walk through the walls we build to protect us, that only hinder us. To embrace living as it should be. To steer our lives in ways we may never have imagined.
Renato Passalacqua 