MY MENTOR WRITES
Your legacy will never include your potential contribution to society until you haul out from the world below your mentor line to the world that exists above said mentor line. I, for one, would like to know what your creative and insightful mind can produce up there.
This is the same choice I had to make some years ago. Going up where no man has gone before changed my life for the much better. It hurts to watch you spending all this precious time incessantly banging yourself against the mentor line. Of course it's your choice.
MY RESPONSE
Sir William,
While I know you are right, I have a weakness for an audience, and whenever I venture to the edge, I look back and no one is there.
We are few who have your wisdom much less your capacity to exist in "Nowhere Land."
Jim
IN A LARGER CONTEXT
Dear Reader,
Just let us say this is not about me, but about you.
Let us imagine you have something to say to the rest of us, indeed, to the rest of the world and are afraid you might offend someone, or prove short of the mark -- in this case -- your mentor.
We all have someone we look up to -- a parent, a friend, a colleague, an author -- somebody.
Suppose we stay within our narrow confines; don't venture beyond the walls within us crying to be expressed, until one day, now old with waning energy. we put the idea out of our mind and coast to oblivion.
I've often wondered how many reading me are of such a mind. Jacques Barzun was 93 when he published his magnum opus, "Dawn to Decadence" (2000).
Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land
Writing involves simply putting one word in front of another, then reading them out loud back to yourself, then possibly unscrambling them to say more precisely what you mean to say.
If you do, I salute you for the effort wherever you may live and in whatever language you are most comfortable on this small planet.
Then you are mentoring "the god within" to show its face. You have found purchase in "Nowhere Land."
To that end, I wish you well.
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