My Aim in Life

Deprived of the comfort of religion by my ability to form ideas and opinions based on my experiences rather than folklore, I have struggled to find something to fill that void. Along the way, so many decades, I tested everything from Tolstoy’s nihilism to Voltaire’s cosmic laugh, to my parent’s sad version of Christianity, to Buddhism, to Transcendental Meditation, to New Age philosophies. I found them all wanting.

In the end, only my art, my storytelling, consoles me.  My aim in life is to write stories that express what I feel is my truth, which I freely admit is a moving target. And write those stories as well as I can. I no longer care so much if they get published or not. My reward is in their creation, in the day by day, word by word crafting of ideas into actions and characters and emotions.

At the end of my life, I hope to pass away not hoping for some divine intervention, but looking back with love and tender regret, thinking, “Oh, the story I could have written about this!”