I’m going to give you a blessing for the new year. Maybe you need it and maybe you don’t, but I’m going to give it to you.
     I’m well aware that I have no authority over you and that I may mean almost nothing to you, but I’m going to give you this blessing anyway:

     If there’s something crazy that you want to do, you have my blessing to do so.

     I don’t particularly mean that you should go skydiving naked, unless that’s something that puts a tingle in your giblets. What I mean is that you should do something magical that the voices in your head have always held you back from doing.

     Go compose a song.

     Take a painting lesson.

     Write that novel.

     Post your poetry on Facebook if there’s no place else to put it.

     Take six hundred pictures of that weird bird that keeps attacking your garden hose and share them (okay, like ten of the good ones) with your friends.

     Make something that didn’t exist and ignore that son of a bitch in your head that makes you feel embarrassed about sharing it with other people. Make some art, make some music, make some poetry, and for fuck’s sake, blast it out across the whole universe and don’t feel weird about it at all.
     Because.
     Because out there somewhere is one person, or maybe ten thousand people, who will love what you did. Your art will speak to them. Your song will make them dance across the kitchen while they’re making toast. Your novel will make them realize that they’ve got a tale to tell and they’ll pick up a sexy fountain pen and write their story in notebooks and on napkins and on the backs of old envelopes, and then they’ll share right back at you.
     I see posts where people say dismissive and condescending things like “Every soccer mom who buys a camera thinks she’s a photographer.”
     Well, you know what?
     She is.
     And if people don’t think so? Tell them to go eat shit.
     Be ridiculous. Let that part of you that liked to color when you were five back out into the world. You don’t have to be so grown-up all the time. Life is too serious to not also be beautiful.
     Wouldn’t the world be more amazing if you went and did something delusional?