To those who would love to see me execute a painting from start to finish, or create any of the other beautiful things that I make, I do understand. I’d want to also. Truth be told though, you can only watch what I do. Much of what happens is cerebral and you have no access to that part. Nor do you have access to painterly sensations to experience that wide world of motivation.

If you did get to sit through a work and see every stroke of the brush, listen to every thing I listen too, and watch the project from blank canvas to ‘done’ you still wouldn’t know how it really happens. It would be akin to watching a cow make milk. Interesting, but not informative.

It makes sense, then, that you might disagree with what I’ve done.

In previous posts here, I’ve rehearsed some of the reasons that made it necessary that I’ve left a perfectly good job that I was well capable of performing for as long as the company would have me stay and at this point, they’re old news. The back seat driver crowd will look over my shoulder and decide for me that the move was inexcusable. Any difficulty from here will allow them to wag their finger at me and exclaim my folly. None of my reasons will be adequate because, “it’s real money dude! it’s a lot of it man! you won’t make that much again!” etcetera etcetera and etcetera.

Serious challenges from here on will be answered by knowing souls with either derision or scorn because money is the determiner of one’s course, dontcha know.

Well it is serious. It is reasonable to expect that a man will provide for his maintenance and do it honorably. No one wants to see someone create a problem of themselves. No. So I don’t blame you at all if your attitude is that I made a seriously stupid move by withdrawing my name from the company where I devoted my loyalty to help it thrive for twenty four years. Not at all.

You are probably sensible and maybe you are correct. I’ve always been like you in that respect, and over and over I was dead wrong.

Truth, and this is an embarrassing confession, I would have voted against the human circulatory system as presently designed. And walking upright? Come on! Obviously people would fall over and it would be exhausting just to remain vertical. The push only engineering for blood movement just seems risky. I would have shot down the venturi concept that made carburetion work for gasoline powered cars. I would have laughed at the simple solution that a clutch is.

I would have agreed with Jonah in his reluctance to go into the big city and tell screw ups that they were doomed if they didn’t turn their lives around.

Noah, the real one, not the one in the propaganda movie, built his escape boat inland for a hundred years or so subject all the while to derision and threats. He made no headway in his warnings to most people. They just called his bluff and went on with what they were doing. Some few made nuisances of themselves. Noah was not bluffing, however and the same year that his righteous grandfather died the way was cleared and the flood in fact washed over the face of the entire planet. Especially with the recent scientific discovery that stores of water to exceed four times the entire volume of all oceans are stored in the earth, it is easy to believe the biblical record. If you think otherwise, you are in large company because neither did the people who Noah warned.

Plausibility is just known supporting fact. Without that support, then there are many things, many ideas, many dreams that make no sense.

People watch football and soccer because they don’t know everything and want to see how it plays out. Along the way, they’ll shout at the players about how to do their job better and they’ll shout at each other afterward because team loyalties direct game critique. If fans knew everything, then they’d know the games before the games even played.

No doubt, nearly everyone not familiar with the story and it’s outcome would have told young lad David not to go up against the giant blowhard that could squish him like a bug. He knew something others did not know.

If the presence of risk and struggle determines the stupidity of a decision, then we’re an accidental civilization because our history is choc full of people who went against the tide and they or their successors carried out their ‘impossible’ dreams.

Human history seems to be saturated with the achievers and the murmuring crowds of dream killers who throw obstacles in their paths.

True, there are dreamers whose vision proved ill advised or went catastrophically wrong, but you don’t know which of the current crop of risky ventures are garbage and which are foundational.

So if you think my decisions to first, leave a job and second, throw in with the creative community are idiotic, okay. I think it really does look iffy and I don’t blame you for your concern.  I wish it were possible to let people see this crazy world with the lid off. That which is pulling for us is greater than that which works to bring us down, unless of course we’re devoting ourselves to the wrong work. In the case of Noah, he looked silly to them but he survived because there was more to the story than the detractors knew and they refused to factor that in.

Let me quote them: “oops”.

Or something along those lines.

Practice that.