I grew up in a small town in NE Wisconsin. It was semi-rural but had a lot of attributes some of us mistakenly confused with the big city. It was sprawled out and massive and took forever to go anywhere, you pretty much had to have some sort of wheels. There wasn't a lot of light pollution. And yet when it was night, we could see thousands of stars of the Milky Way when the street lights went out, and Cassiopeia hanging in the southern distance.
We rode bikes and didn’t come home unless it was time for dinner. Some of us were feral; some of us weren’t. I wasn’t. I was more mature for my age than my peers, and that set me apart.
I learned how to read when I was two years old. It was spontaneous and I didn’t watch Sesame Street. According to family legend, I looked at my cousin Peter’s sweatshirt while sitting in a high chair and pointed a finger and said loudly, “Harvard University”, which was what was written across his chest.
I went to a Catholic parochial school for eight years, and then to the local public high school. I found high school easy because, as my Jewish mother asserted, I would get a better academic education at a parochial school than I would if I hadn’t been taught by nuns, and she was right. College was tough until I figured out how to do it, and then that was also a breeze.
Migrating to New York City broadened my education in a deeper way: artistic breakthroughs, lifelong connections developed, deep connections broken, poverty, homelessness, damage from serious hustlers. With no family to count on, I had to rely on my own sharpened instincts with my kindness intact, my toughness hardened, and a ever-present fierce desire to succeed, learn, and grow. As an author friend of mind once said: In New York, you cannot afford to be weak.
Life is a series of growth spurts, some of them awkward to the naked eye, but available if you're open to them. Many people choose to settle on one or two levels of life and are happy there, and that is their right to do so. Many times circumstances conspire in that direction.
But that makes Evolution akin to Revolution. Choosing to evolve can light up everyone's existence. That is what we strive to do as artists and as human beings.
It's said by some to "concentrate on what you want". What I want is to be the best performer I can be in every way: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.