anonymity, vapors of my own unwanted

sunday.

i woke up late and sleepbiked to school. pedaling in a fog.
trying to make it on time for my tutoring session with a seventh grader.

on a side street between melrose and santa monica blvd, a cherry red ferrari thundered by. i peered in through the tinted glass, trying to glimpse the kind of person who drives such a thing, trying to confirm my own bias, my own preset archetype.

i felt a thud of something landing inside me. a math equation pointing to an answer i didnt like: winner vs. loser...good vs. bad...power vs. weakness...success vs. failure.

the driver might as well have been riding on a ocean of million dollar bills, and i might have been trickling along the vapors of my own unwanted anonymity.

and then i told myself...ari, what do you truly WANT, do you really WANT attention for owning a sports car...is that how you want to be read in the world?

the answer, of course, is no.

what i truly want, more than anything else, is to wage peace.
i want to strengthen my mind so it can accept--with equal enthusiasm--the ups and downs of life, the vagaries of being alive.

i want to begin each morning with a prayer for the gift of life, and spend my waking hours living that benediction.
and i know that it is only through a peaceful mind, a calm constitution that i can hear what nourishes my soul. everything else is the noise of ego. and the ego is never satisfied.

the soul doesn't need satisfaction. it only wants to be set free, to enjoy the art of living, the process of being alive.

my soul is art. not the thing we create on a canvas or something for a CV or museum.

my soul is art. and my life must be the artist. for the two to become one, i must get out of the way.