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Something I've quickly realized about writing is that, contrary to what I initially expected, my best work is very emotionally driven. Not just my best ideas, but my best wordsmithing too. Never do I feel more full of creativity and just words I want to record than when I really feeling some sort of way. The most reliable way to induce such a state is to watch or read or listen to or experience something truly poignant and touching. Then, the words flow like water. That is what is behind my ideal word vomit.

It's funny because I often get all these ideas when I'm in the worst state to actually write anything down. During a heated conversation, in the middle of a blockbuster film. I try to hold on to the ideas and phrases, and for the most part I do a fine job! But the emotional state driving everything very very ebbs away. That cloudy pool of feelings drips away from reach, nestling itself in the a safe crevice somewhere inside the amygdala. So then I'm left with nothing but lifeless letters to toy with.

I spend all this time intellectualizing and explaining away my actions as if that will help me recapture the magic that I sometimes wield. As any magician will say, you can only know it by feeling its power for yourself. No mere words will energize your limbs and get your fingers moving. Maybe you all have felt it too.

But that's all talk for another day. Right now I do happen to be feeling something. I won't say what or why, I'll leave the subtext to fill that role. Let's just say I's been something of a long day and a short night, and now I am at the keyboard and ready to write. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to talk about, and I only need to jumpstart my creative engine to get moving. Today is the opposite; I'm running at a cool 500 horsepower with plenty of gas in the tank. I just don't quite know where to go.

And I mean I can go anywhere. Truly anywhere. And that's the hardest part. When you can go anywhere you want to go everywhere. Who wouldn't? How could anyone say no to that big wide world out there.

People tell me sometimes I have drive and ambition. And I'm not saying that I don't. I am someone who deeply wants things. I don't often let myself know it, but there are so many things I wish to do, so many people I wish to be. I want to soar through the skies. I want to taste the clouds and look down upon. I want to stand before crowds and make them roar. I want to host a gallery displaying all my finest works, and have friends and spectators alike view them in awe. I want to climb the greatest peaks and throw a rock as far as I can and see it tumble down the mountain. I want to name every animal and plant I have ever seen.

I want to understand people - not a specific person, but people - to know them from their histories and peer into the veil of their futures. I want to be Iron Man. I want to be your local neighbourhood fruit vendor. I want to be president and CEO and king of my own tiny little slice of land. I want to be a teenage delinquint who got their first taste of beauty and realized it healed a tiny scar they never knew they had.

I want to be a bird and a bee and a butterfly. Oh, I would love to be a tree. What must a leaf think as it flutters gently to the ground. Does it, too, want what I do?

I want to live 1000 lives and still be hungry for more.

Or do I? I don't even know for sure. All I know is that I do really want to do things, and that I'm not doing as much as I could be doing. I never am, and that always, always bothers me, just a little tiny bit. But I mean come on. How could anyone want anything less? How could anyone be placed on this planet, have precious life breathed into them. See the stars and the trees and the mountains. The skyscrapers and the families and the great shows we put on. How could they see that and not want it all?

And let's be realistic. Entirely honestly speaking. None of this is possible. Maybe bits and pieces here and there, but I'm not even coherent. I can't see the shape of my own desire, only to poke and prod at it while it hints at me to learn something new or push myself in some new and unexpected fashion.

Does it really matter though? Even if it isn't all, strictly speaking, possible, the important part is that it feels like it could be. It must be ironic to sit here listing out all these unfulfilled aspirations so recently after saying I could die tomorrow and be happy, but both things really are true. And more than that, I think they're both two sides of the same idea. The reason I can be so content and carefree is because I know my mission, at least the vague shape of it, and I can live knowing that I always did my honest best to fill that impossibly huge bucket one drop at a time.

I can't help but do my best everyday. Or at least try. I have some days I'm not entirely proud of, but I still do everything that I can. And knowing that is very comforting. I've done my best so far and it got me here. I couldn't have asked for anything more of myself, and so I look around me and am deeply satisfied with what I've become. I know that I'll continue to do my best, and maybe one day I will be soaring through the skies or scaling mountains. It's about the journey, not the destination.