“[11 pm] My face is all twisted up in a wry expression because I just reread parts of my journal from last summer. By July I’d already gotten the idea for Karateka. I could have finished the damn thing last summer, if I’d worked as hard and steadily as I am now. But who knows? Maybe all that time to mull it over and draw ultimately useless pictures is why it’s going so well now. Maybe if I’d plunged in prematurely I’d have made a mess of it. Certainly, I wouldn’t have shot the film. I guess I can’t really wish to have done anything differently.”
– Jordan Mechner, The Making of Karateka
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“Our senses by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies. I call this “composting.” Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.”
– Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
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Time is not the enemy.
Regret can be reframed as, “not yet.”
Anything could be done sooner but would it be done better?
It’s reassuring to focus on what I can do now, not on what I could or should have done before.
Everything needs it’s time to gestate.
I can never be a precocious nineteen-year-old like Jordan, designing my first hit computer game.
I was never a precocious nineteen-year-old. I cannot compare myself.
Can I be a precocious forty-two-year-old?
Does it work like that?
I regret not trying, striving, seeking some purposeful creative life when I was a teenager.
How many opportunities did I miss?
Time for another reframing exercise.
Perhaps some of us require a little longer to bear fruit.
Maybe this is the perfect time to begin.
Conversations With Quotations 