Wake up! Yeah… you and you and you too, wake up! Stop dreaming, stop pretending to be happy with the things you have and fantasizing of the things you want, as though having things was the most important thing in the world, man—as if they were important at all. Gotta find those uppers to squeeze the last drop of lethargy from your world, your eyelashes glued together by habit and evaporated tears.

Imagine you’re in a story, a story where you have no idea who the author is and don’t know his or her reasons, where every word put to paper brings greater clarity to discovering your vibe, your behavior, and by tale’s end, your destiny. You’d be ready to spring into boundless, exciting possibilities, eager to be transformed into a reshaped and redefined you, every page not yet written, every idea not yet put to ink opening up a howling array of prospects. You carry only a single prayer on your lips, that the author have a vivid—even wild—imagination to allow you an unfettered existence, one where the verve of life stings every sense in your body with each passing second, combining to create a hysteria of emotion, out of control but very much bopping inside you.

But—dig this—even as this dream comes true, one page bleeding into the next, you come to a startling discovery by the end of chapter one: you’re static, powerless to run from your peril and impotent to shake off the crap attributed to you which, outside the tale, you would strikethrough. And so this glorious freedom is, at once, a jail sentence, and you, voiceless, can’t even beg your freedom because you agreed—you agreed—to play the part defined by others who don’t know you as well as they should, who have no respect for the person you truly want to be.

Now, imagine yourself the author of that story, a tale of you by you. Feel that moxie, that unquenchable desire for all of everything to sweep over you and carry you away, even though you have no idea what everything is and you haven’t a clue where away will take you. Here, there are no strikethroughs because your voice and your choice are your own, the craziness of unlimited possibilities piloting the vessel.

So, taking pen to paper, you begin, though sittin’ and writin’ dulls adventure because this is not about writing, it is not about redefining a new you in your imagination, it is about living all the you’s you may yet be, a conglomerate of all the things everyone ever has been. Your narrative sails off into an unknowable future, provides the same endless possibilities of who you evolve into as if written by another. The unrestricted freedom of choice hasn’t changed except by your decision to allow it, to allow the will of the many become the will of your one—house, family, things, doldrums, pasted eyelashes.

If you get this, you may yet open your eyes. Achievement is an end, one applauded by the consensus. But to live is to journey through the unknown, while a destination is nothing more than a premature death. Forget the destination and hold onto the intensity and tingle of a life in transit; grab it with gusto. Look at the stars—so many stars—and breathe in the different scents of your surroundings. The journey is the substance of your life. Never settle, never accept, this is who I am. That’s the death knell, and the only way to forestall the striker upon the dome is to be ever-changing. Only then are you a participant in every story.