You Only Die Once

The other night I was making banana bread when I had the idea for a baking show about baking stuff even if you don’t have the perfect setting or ingredients and that’s when it hit me. What I mean to say is, the edible hit just then and so too did the realization that this should be the approach we take with everything in life. I consider myself a sometimes writer because sometimes, I’ll write something so fantastic (to my mind, at least) that I’ll be convinced I must have finally “found my voice,” Then I’ll go for months (or, you know, years) without writing anything even remotely as complete or profound. This of course leads me to believe I’m no writer at all, just a fraud with the occasional lucky stroke of something approximating genius. Oh, I have ideas. A paragraph here, a snippet of article there, a decent personal rambling blog jotted down in my notes app. But nothing I deem “enough” – not good enough, not complete enough, not thought out enough. So I never start the blog, I never write the thing, I never simply begin. But in the kitchen, mixing banana bread in a pot because I don’t have mixing bowls (an unfortunate side effect of losing a house, but that’s a story for another day), dumping ingredients together in an apparently haphazard manner, I realized the foolishness of waiting until I had things “all figured out.” If I can make banana bread every weekend because I keep buying bananas then not eating them all, then what else can I do if I just take what I have now and make something of it? After all, we get one life and it’s not an entirely long one when you get right down to it. Do something, do anything, do everything. Try it. Whatever “it” is to you, do it. Do it now. Stop worrying about being prepared or getting it perfect. Just start. Do it before you’re ready. Do it nervous. Do it imperfect. But do it. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s not like it’s gonna kill you. And if it does, hey, you can only die once. So this is me, doing it. Whatever “it” is. Writing. About anything, about everything, about nothing. I’m not writing for one topic, one niche. I’m writing about whatever my brain screams about, whatever my soul ignites for, whatever my fancy is momentarily tickled by. Complete articles, Livejournal era brain vomit, fiction, poetry, bullshit from my notes app, thoughts, memories, tall tales and whatever else finds its way here. And as for my life offline? Well, life handed me lemons but I decided to make banana bread.