Romantic relationships can be emotionally stabilizing or
motivating, and can also be a great distraction, but relationships with friends
and family are a must. I’ve talked about
my friend Alexandra enough that this should already be obvious. Whereas being in the middle of a romance may
inspire one to greatness, especially if you are married with a family that
needs financial backing and financial wooing, properly developing friendships
and family relationships water the seeds of intellectual rose petals. Without these intellectual rose petals, you
won’t be a writer and you won’t be successful.
Financial wooing is important, trust me… if there are any
sugar mommas out there to support my life forever, or just some well-meaning
patron, contact me immediately. Still, a
writer must be able to spend time in the fields of intellectual and artistic
greatness if personality-destroying fame is ever to become a reality, and that
does not happen in romantic relationships.
Romantic relationships are, as I said in my previous post, a distraction
to the type of thought and work-time a writer and artist must become
well-acquainted with. Perhaps a romantic
relationship feeds the right emotions needed, but the required processes of the
mind need to be fed somewhere else.
For some, a Lone Ranger fight against the world is the
intellectual field that will bloom greatness; even for those some, of which I
consider myself one, friends and family are still needed. Maybe the ties with friends and family don’t
need to be strong but they need to exist all the same. Family provides, at the very least, a source
of ego-stroking love that every writer wants.
Starting out is a hard business and I couldn’t imagine doing it without
the knowledge that I have a family behind me.
Friends, though, are the key. It’s not a bad thing that you can’t choose
your family—our families are a lesson in life if nothing else—friends provide
the opportunity to choose characters, minds, and abilities that will help you
grow as a writer, an artist, or whatever the heck you want to be. My friends Alexandra, Paul, and Ben Sloan all
bring an artistically-minded confidence to our friendship along with their
brilliant artistic abilities, for whom I am particularly grateful; my “other”
family as I call them, the Ulmers, along with Dr. Scott Kisker, bring me a
source of spiritual support and forgiveness that I’d be lost without in
addition to a constant, high-level intellectual challenge to all that I think
and believe, not to mention that they are great friends and great models for
the life that I hope to lead; and I have a wonderful collection of friends
whose faith and love will always keep my writing grounded in the realities of
life as well as my dreams for what life could be. These are the qualities that I most value in
friends for the sake of our friendship but also for the sake of my hoped-for
career. It’s a lesson that we all must
learn: how to choose friends that will breathe life into our soul and help us
mold ourselves into the person that we want to be. And sometimes, you just need to spend time
with people that you love, friends or family, to laugh heartily. Hopefully, though, those people that you
“just simply love” also possess the qualities that you’d hope for in a close
relationship or more of an acquaintance-type relationship.
Of course, we cannot forget the many people who have
already shaped us as we go forth to choose our friends. It is with their memory that we should best
learn the type of person that we want close to us as we move forward in
life. Just last night, actually, I had a
dream that my poetry professor who died a number of years ago was alive and
that we could again share poems with one another. That was an important relationship that will
stay with me forever. My grandmother who
passed away, and my grandmother still living but that I am only now starting to
greatly appreciate (I’ve been a terrible grandson, son, brother, cousin,
nephew, all of the above, for most of my life); my grandfathers, my cousins,
aunts, uncles, and obviously my nuclear family; my Spanish teachers, my
philosophy professor, my English professors, and my seminary professors; my
pastors, particularly John Wesley Taylor and Allen Merrill and Doug
Robinson-Johnson; all these people have not only shaped who I am but have
worked hard at protecting me, loving me, and teaching me, and just plain making
sure that I’m alive, that I owe it to them to learn the valuable lessons that
they have to teach me and to make something of myself. Even if you, my reader, decide not to have
close relationships with your family or any of the people who have gone before
you, I urge all of us to remember those people so that we can create better
relationships moving forward with people that we most want relationships with
to best shape us and develop our greatness.
Greatness may come isolated but never in a vacuum. I myself isolate myself oftentimes, sometimes
accidentally but usually on purpose, but that doesn’t mean that the
relationships I have with people aren’t important. I’d still be without any life-vision or right
perspective on the work required to be a writer if it weren’t for Alexandra,
Paul, and Ben. And I’d be totally
without an intellectual vision if it weren’t for the Ulmers and Dr.
Kisker. Relationships, not romantic but
just general relationships, are vital to creative greatness.
I only wish that my friends and I had some cool name like
the Inklings.
(P.S. I promise to
stop theorizing on life in the near future and focus more on what I’m actually
doing with my life to make all of these dreams come true)
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