Tonight I was drawn unexpectedly back into my past. It’s often the first few years of life that forge the most overwhelming memories and for me a solid 80% of them are directly related to this or that children’s book. I’ve spent quite a while browsing through Amazon’s listings, picking out covers I recognize and titles I remember, trying my best to find those works which have had such an impact on me that I consider them classics.

But this all brought me back to one book in particular which I had forgotten about since sometime during my childhood. I just reread it and was pleasantly surprised to find that the battle I… or should I say, we… are fighting is the one we’ve always fought and one that every imaginative, creative, living, breathing human being has ever fought… The Waiting Place:

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right… or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place…

…for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or the waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for the wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.

NO! That’s not for you!

- Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go

As most people grow up, though, they sacrifice their imaginations for status or wealth or some other superficial thing and they lose their will to splash wildly against the current. It’s much easier to wait. Waiting is just a symptom of inaction. Waiting is our natural state. But there’s rarely a reward for waiting, and when there is a reward it comes despite the waiting, not because of it.

I have no real commentary to offer on this excerpt, I just found it to hold an astonishingly refreshing bit of hope for me. Hope for the future and a kind of fellowship with the past and all those fighters who have come before us.

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3. Slavery of the Mind
4. My Quest for Ignorance
5. Bullshit with Bullets