| Dearest fellow creator,
I am lying on my back on the terrace just outside our hotel room, watching reflections of clouds roll by on skyscraper windows. The woman I love sits a few feet from me, and her children are just beyond reach. We are all staring at our screens, relaxing as the heat of the summer day slowly subsides. Someone thought it was a good idea to visit New York City during the hottest week of the year, and that someone was me.
This morning we slept in again and ordered bagels before I had to rush off to meet my agent for lunch, where we talked about what’s next for me and why I can’t do what I’ve always done if I want to be true to what I am becoming.
Last night, we saw Hamilton at its original theater and dined on street food just before midnight. Earlier that evening, I had drinks with an editor at one of the big New York publishing houses and wondered how I got here. She told me my idea was interesting, and I believed her.
A few days before all this transpired, I had an impulse to book a last-minute trip to the City That Never Sleeps, and before I went to bed that night, it was all planned. Seemed like an appropriate last hurrah before summer begins to unwind and the kids go back to school. We’ve had a blast so far, but it occurs to me in this moment of solace as I take in a little natural beauty in an unnatural environment: I almost didn’t do it. Any of it. Not just the trip, but the whole life: the writing and the love and the travel—all of it.
As we were buzzing through midtown Manhattan earlier today, chuckling at the chorus of car horns while trying to remain cool in an overpopulated, under-ventilated Uber, I said thank you. Not with words or even conscious thoughts. Just with a deep feeling of gratitude reverberating within. I felt grateful to the part of me who would not settle for anything less than an interesting life and to the part who remembers to enjoy it. It's a wonderful thing, to have a life that is at once a construction of yours and still an unexpected blessing. It seems to me that we do not create our lives and then live into them; but rather, that we live our lives in the way that we see fit, and in doing so, we create them. That’s what it means to—pardon the cliche—live your best life.
You do not build a life you love merely with goals and wishes and dreams. You build it with action. By doing the very things you hope for some day, right now. That doesn’t mean we don’t save up for a rainy day or plan ahead when we can. It doesn’t mean we can’t imagine what we would love. But it does mean that we’d better get started if we want to have a thing we long for. And that begins here, with what we have and where we are.
And as we learn to appreciate this little moment right in front of us, we begin to build what we love. Because you cannot create what you do not love. Love is the very essence of creation. It is the energy of all things, or so the wisdom traditions keep trying to tell us. If you do not love what you are creating, it cannot live. It will not last. So you and I just take a careful look at these creations called our lives. Do we love what we see? Would we change any of it? If so, we need to start now. We must either change what we cannot abide or learn to love it all. Maybe both. When we both accept responsibility for our lives and learn to let go of absolute control, we begin to experience it all anew, like a young child might. And that is when living becomes magical again.
May you experience that very reality today.
Best,
Jeff
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