What will you do if you don’t win the lottery? That’s a question we tend not to ask ourselves or pose to others. And why should we? Where’s the fun and excitement in a question like that? How can we be expected to locate our dreams and make our lengthy list of extravagant things we intend to buy if and when our quick-pick or psychically selected numbers turn over and make us into instant millionaires?
And that is precisely why we need to ask – not what we’ll buy if we win, but what we plan to do if we don’t. Because what we do is what matters; our actions are always the deciding and defining factors in our lives. Shakespeare said, “Action is eloquence,” and Goethe told us to “be bold and the mighty forces will come to our aid.” Descartes should have said, “I act, therefore I am,” but apparently failed to. We may proclaim that we exist because we think, ponder, and continue to fantasize about the always and forever better life, but thought without action – when action is needed – tends to be little more than an intellectual exercise in futility. Thinking without acting rarely, if ever, leads us to any deep sense of fulfillment. Of course, the opposite approach – acting without thinking – tends to produce dangerously unfavorable results for many people.
I didn’t intend to turn this into a philosophical treatise about buying lottery tickets; however, I am a philosopher, as well as a poet, and so what else could it be? And now the question has become: To buy or not to buy a lottery ticket? This is one of the questions I answered for myself more than a decade ago. There is a fundamental difference between being and buying which I intend to explore in this brief essay (or bold vignette, depending upon its length and your perception).
Eleven years ago I was struggling to maintain a life of mediocrity – doing my damnedest to try to fit in where I really didn’t belong. There is nothing rare or exceptional about a situation like that; in fact, most of the people I know are living their own version of it. Having been there myself, I remain sensitive to the struggle to get out of such a situation when we know in our hearts and souls that we truly need to. I was there long enough to have earned the insights that I wish now to share with those who may want to make use of them. And I don’t have to think very long or look very far to realize there are plenty of you.
More and more people are working longer and harder for less than what they were earning a decade ago (when we adjust for the rate of inflation), driven by a deeply misguided bottom-line mindset, fueled by fear, and shaped by greed as much as anything. There are plenty of facts, figures, and statistical data to support the opinions, beliefs, and faulty notions on all sides. The numbers are widely available elsewhere – in other books, printed reports, newspapers, and in both print and online magazines – but not here. I prefer to speak from my own area of expertise, which is philosophy and the poetry that emerges from my personal experience. I am, after all, the world’s foremost expert on my very own personal experience, and I will continue to draw from that.
I bought my last lottery ticket eleven years ago while attempting to figure out how to extricate myself from the work routine, which at that time was less than to my liking. I was searching for a way out – a healthy way in which to make a legitimate and significant change. It wasn’t as if things were really awful in my life; in fact, there were a number of things that I thought to be wonderful back then, and still do to this day. Still and all, there was something deeply fundamental to my being that was missing. When we are less than satisfied with our daily routine, there is a tendency to believe we can buy our way out of it and spend our way into a better one, which is not entirely true nor entirely false. When we sense that something deep is missing, the thing we need and want the most isn’t something we can purchase, even if we choose the winning lotto numbers, making us into instant multi-millionaires.
So did I have the winning ticket with a $40,000,000 payday? Did my numbers line up eleven years ago, permitting me to make the change I felt the need to make? I won’t say yet. I’ll let you wonder; I’ll allow you to guess for now, though I promise to tell you before the end of this vignette.
There I was, holding that little ticket in my hand, wondering what I would do if I won. Where would I want to live if I could afford to live nearly anywhere? What kind of car (or cars!) would I buy? How much would I spend on fine art to hang on the many walls of the numerous rooms of my new home? And once I had my new home filled with fine antiques and masterful art to ponder freely and appreciate fully, and my shiny new cars, and a thousand or more artfully-bound first edition books, arranged by subject, filling the custom-made mahogany shelves in my exquisite home library – and the list could go on and on ad infinitum – what to do? No matter what we have or don’t have, what to do remains the real core question we keep coming back to.
What did I really want to do? When your imagination seems to be in suspended animation and your creative mind has been sentenced to solitary confinement, surrounded by the noise of screaming prisoners, thinking about the things you might do if you did win the lottery can be a useful trick to loosen the lock on the cell that you’ve put yourself in. Once I felt free enough to imagine some of the things I would acquire if I could afford them, the restraints I had placed upon an array of bold and bright possibilities began to vanish with the afternoon wind. I knew what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, and what I was determined to do no matter what! I wanted to write. I needed to write. And I would write if the numbers lined up or if they didn’t. Win or lose, the answer was the same: “I am a writer, and I will write.”
And once again, with that lottery ticket still in my hand, I felt compelled to ask myself, ”What will I do if I don’t win the lottery?” And now that I knew, it was rather easy for me to answer. Then I asked myself these questions: “Do I really want to win? In my heart of hearts, do I sincerely hope to be holding the winning ticket? Do I really want to join the ranks of instant lottery winners?” And my true and honest answer – mano a mano – was: ”No. I would much prefer to earn my fortune as a direct result of my full commitment to the work I was destined to do.”
I didn’t want to win something that could possibly rob me of the need to fulfill my fate. I didn’t want to be given anything that could lessen my desire to dig deeply enough to discover my own understanding. And as I say that now, I can hear the masses chanting in unison, “The hell with understanding! Just give me the $40,000,000.”
I could easily understand such a chant, and at another time I might have been tempted to join in. But on that memorable day eleven years ago, when I asked myself in earnest if I really wanted to win the lottery, my answer that day was: “No. I really don’t.” And I’ve been winning nearly every single solitary day ever since!
I am a winner each and every morning when I wake with gratitude and eagerness to continue. I leap out of bed – literally from the foot of my bed – directly into the day before me. I leap forward with a rich, unbridled sense of enthusiasm to carry on with the work I love in this life that I’ve been given. “One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.” That is something Sophocles said in about 440 BCE, and it remains relevant to this day.
So was I a winner that fated day eleven years ago? Yes! I most certainly was. Did the numbers on my lottery ticket all line up in order to make me an instant multi-millionaire? No, they did not. Am I doing what I love and living true to my understanding? Yes, I am; absolutely, without a doubt. Well, I do face doubts from time to time, though they never really threaten to do me in. I face them openly, whenever they come around, for the sake of deeper certainty. And now that my good fortune and yours are connected by the threads of fate that run through all of humanity, I want to encourage you to ask yourself: “What will I do if I don’t win the lottery?” And when you find the answer, write it down and follow it faithfully – all the way to the riches you deserve.
Ink to paper… cobalt blue, or call it midnight. Either way it is the elixir of extended life – and more, so much more – a roadmap to the soul whenever we speak our truth in solitude. On cloudy days I spill sunlight onto empty pages and watch thought waves become heat waves in the midst of a winter storm. I’ve known turbulence, tedium, and torment, as well as the warm and vital energy of serenity. I’ve wrestled with grand abstractions, on land and at sea.
But I could not for the life of me find my way in the Midwest. I didn’t belong there. So I left, although I do so honor the many memories I carried with me when I moved west and found the life that I was meant to live.
California is my home – in the deepest, truest sense of what we imagine, hope, and wish our homes to be. It takes time to fully surrender to the truth of what we wish for, pray for, and aspire to become. It takes time to fully honor our own fates. It isn’t easy. It never is – nor is it meant to be. That being said, if it isn’t joyful and rewarding for you a significant part of the time, chances are that you have yet to realize the dream that holds the key you need to unlock the door that opens out to the road that leads you through your destiny. And chances are, if the dream that seems beyond your reach keeps moving toward the horizon you keep moving away from, you’ll never meet – like the fantasy lover you know you’ll never embrace. Its funny how running away from what we think we want tends to keep us from ever really having it. We’d rather call it a mystery and leave it at that. We keep slipping away from what we truly want and accuse it of being elusive.
Ink to paper… cobalt blue, or call it midnight. Either way it remains the elixir of extended life – the tabula rasa of true intention I continue coming back to. I’ve been to sea, and have seen the beauty and the power of more than one ocean. I’ve watched sunlight dance like golden angels upon a moving cerulean dance floor. I’ve stood on the upper deck of a good-sized ship, permitting ferocious waves to thoroughly soak me while I pretended to be Ulysses. I’ve been to sea, but do not call me Ishmael. That name would never suit me, not to mention the fact that Melville claimed it long ago, and it has lasted. My name sounds nothing at all like Odysseus – which is not to suggest that my life has lacked adventure, or that I see it as anything less than my odyssey.
Leviathan lives on land and in the sea; it dwells in the waters of our psyches and swims in our deep imaginations, which makes it part of the lexicon we came in with – part of the language written into and onto the soul. And we need it if we wish to live and tell our own true stories. We need it in order to fully honor our uniquely individual destiny. And what could be more honorable than that?
I have neither the need nor the desire to borrow even a single line from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” nor any reason whatsoever to aim my crossbow at an albatross. And I, like Dante in the middle of his journey, have found myself within a forest dark, but not because the straightforward pathway had been lost, but rather because of the time I spent attempting to follow a path I knew I wasn’t suited for, denying my intuition and opposing my soul. The straightforward path kept leading me astray until I found my way along the circular path. And so, in the spirit of dear old Mr. Thoreau, who wrote in first person while living alone for a time on Walden Pond, I’m saying this: Ink to paper… cobalt blue, or call it midnight. Either way it remains the elixir of a true and better life.
Books are given as gifts throughout much of the world – for birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, and the occasional just because. Those of us who love to read consider our favored books to be great treasures. When we receive one as a gift, there is a tendency to treasure it that much more. When we choose a book for someone else – a book we wish to give to another – we never really know how powerful an impact it might have on them or how long its scope of influence might last.
I wasn’t much of a reader until I turned fifteen. There were a few books I enjoyed reading before that time, but none that moved me enough to help construct and shape the character that would allow me true alignment with my fate. Up until that time, I preferred running, playing, and finding trouble on the streets of old Chicago. I had no deep, undeniable sense of who I was, which isn’t unusual at all while we’re in the throes of adolescence.
I remember the first book I ever read with a completely open heart and mind – a book that carried me to and through a realm that could not be forgotten. How that wonderful little book came to me in the first place is a rather remarkable story in its own right. It was gifted to me at the age of fifteen by a lovely woman one year shy of twice my age at that time, on a cold, snowy morning in Chicago. It all began with a glorious feast the night before – food and drink and celebration at one of the finest Greek restaurants ever to exist in the metropolitan Midwest: Diana’s – a famous, festive, Mediterranean-style restaurant on the southwest side of Chicago.
I was invited to join my sister, her boyfriend, and a friend of theirs I hadn’t met before. We arrived at the restaurant and got in line behind thirty or forty people, which was typical and could always be expected at Diana’s, where the celebration started right there where you stood. Waiting in line at Diana’s was unlike waiting at nearly any other restaurant. Everyone talked, everyone smiled, everyone periodically shouted Opaa! and everyone drank either white or rosé Roditis – provided you were over the age of thirteen. No matter how hungry you felt when you stepped into line, the atmosphere of that well-loved restaurant seemed to pacify even the most starved and impatient patrons. After all, it was really the warm, spectacular ambiance we hungered for most. You could taste the metaphors floating through the air, covered with the delightful scents of fresh-cooked food. How many hours of our lives do we spend waiting without any sense of celebration whatsoever? There are things we have to wait for in this world; it makes sense for us to rejoice while we wait and make the most of the time we’ve been given.
Finally, after rejoicing in line for nearly an hour, we were seated at a round table in the center of the main dining room near the open-hearth fireplace, which was crafted from ancient stones flown in from Athens, we were told, and was an extraordinary blessing on wintery nights in Chicago. It was also the ideal spot from which to watch Petros, the gracious, flirtatious, irrepressible host, perform the dance of life while balancing a full glass of wine atop his head. For the great, robust, triumphant finale, he would drink the wine from the glass he had kept perfectly balanced throughout the dance, then smash the empty glass into the fireplace. “Opaa! Opaa!” we all yelled, as our well-dressed waiter carried our enormous tray of food to our table for four. Octopus, leg of lamb, dolmades (grape leaves stuffed with flavorful rice), fried squid, roasted bell peppers, cucumbers with feta cheese and mint leaves, and probably one or two other dishes I’ve forgotten. And as if all that was not enough, another waiter brought us a seemingly magical flaming cheese – held high on route from the kitchen to our table – a soaring fire several feet above our heads adding to the ambiance of myth and magic in an atmosphere of passion and romance.
We ate fine food, drank good wine, and felt the warmth of the fire – on the outside as well as on the inside. We talked openly about the things that truly matter – the things we loved, the things we dreamt about, the things we needed. I was the young one at the table, an eager teen with raging hormones and big dreams. We shared our thoughts, and not once during that lively, joyful, spirited evening did I ever imagine I would wind up spending the remainder of that spectacular night with the woman one year shy of twice my age, though that was, in fact, what followed.
She woke me in the morning to let me know she was going out to get us breakfast and to stop at the bookstore across the street to buy a book she wanted me to have. She left me alone to reminisce about the fullness of that amazing night of passionate celebration. A short time later, she returned with warm French toast, pure maple syrup, and a paperback copy of Siddhartha, on which she wrote on the inside cover: Everyone’s looking, few people find. I hope that you are one of those who find. Love, Sophia.
I never saw her again after that day, though what we shared that night and day will be with me forever. The book she chose for me was the perfect gift for a young man in search of himself, allowing me to align myself with the pathless path we must pave for ourselves – a path that I have paved with poetry and dreams as much as anything – poetry and dreams that rise together, come to life, and keep me aligned with my fate.