A Hard Act to Follow

Your career as an actor began when you were in junior high school.  Even though you had considerable career-related thoughts, none of these focused on the stage.  You wondered instead what sorts of things you would need to write in order to forge some kind of career as a result of things you wrote being published.

To say that you were in any way cast in your career-beginning venture is to put an undeserved emphasis on the matter.  You were in effect shanghaied to appear in a play which at the time seemed to you one of the dumbest possible reasons for writing a play.  Your role consisted of two lines.  The play, you were later informed, was a one-act, with two scenes.

The purpose of the play was to inform its intended audience, ninth graders about to graduate, what courses to take in high school in order to insure a smooth transition into college after high school.  Nothing wrong with that.  Your issue was more or less with the parallel processes of junior high school, puberty, and the class room curriculum, which in many ways reminded you of the soggy mashed potatoes available in the school cafeteria.

The play, itself, was written by a classmate of yours, someone you would ultimately, but not then, have an enormous crush on, someone you would see perhaps twenty years later, in your editorial office with a book publisher. One of your two lines, which gave you, the author, and the director the most trouble had nothing to do with the theme.  The fact of your ability to remember the line after all these years is dramatic evidence of the quirky nature of your memory.

"We just raided the ice box, and boy, were those drumsticks great."

For the weeks of rehearsal, your brother and sister cast members were wont to tease you with that line, and of the director pleading with you to get some more color in it.

At another time, when you were writing equally dumb lines for a weekly television program of mind boggling, you on a number of occasions, and for the sake of what you then considered your sanity, you tried to include that line as a kind of karmic joke, but the director this time did not plead with you for more color.  In fact, he asked you, "What the fuck are you trying to do to my show, go literary on me?"

Some years later, when you had run up a considerable bar tab at a pub directly across the street from CBS Television City on Fairfax Avenue, an assistant director chum of yours thought to put you to work as an extra on such live TV dramas as Studio One, and Playhouse 90.  You had no lines.  You were merely to be in elevators or barroom scenes or places where the principal characters engaged in their performances.  At one point in such a so-called walk-on part, where you didn't even make it to the script as a distinct piece of business (for which you'd be paid seventy more dollars), you forgot your cue and in consequence tipped your hat at the wrong time.

This was live drama; there could be no retakes.  But instead of being chastised, as you'd expected, the director said he rather appreciated your "bit," took your name, and indeed cast you in a subsequent drama.

This was effectively it for your acting career until you teamed up with Leonard Tourney, who'd had his fill of teaching at Tulsa, gave up his tenure to come back to UCSB as a visiting professor for three years, then until his retirement as a non-senate lecturer.  Leonard was involved in a busy schedule of performing dinner theater mysteries.  He needed an assistant.  During the next ten or so years, you performed in dozens of dinner theater mysteries in roles varying from a fake swami, a shyster lawyer, a detective, a used-car salesman, a minister, a diplomat from a bogus Balkan country, a disgruntled brother-in-law, and an Australian pretending to be an Englishman.

When Leonard left Santa Barbara, such ventures stopped, and you were left to tell students in writing classes and workshops from time to time to "imagine you are the actor cast to portray your role.  How are you going to project authenticity and presence?"

Of course by that time, you'd met your second mentor, the actor, Virginia Gilmore, and you began to step into the vision that has, in fact, become your most current writing project, in which you conflate characters and their actions in books and stories with actors preparing themselves to portray their assigned character.

Starting a new project, in particular one of intended book length, is the equivalent of shaking out a beach towel or picnic blanket; all manner of small, seemingly disparate items go airborne, some being projected considerable distances.  You'd forgotten all about the junior high school play and about the times you'd actually wanted to put more of yourself into acting.  You'd even begun to enhance your enjoyment of plays, certainly Shakespeare's, by imagining yourself such diverse characters as Lear, Feste, the jester from Twelfth Night,and a shot at Falstaff.

Reading for your classes got you imagining yourself as yet other characters, followed by watching filmed dramas more for the purpose of watching the actors "working" than for experiencing the story.

Not many days ago, the awareness came to you that you have, indeed, been an actor, ever since you'd completed your first story.  You were every character in every story you wrote, a fact that was of no small importance to you in revising and tweaking the twelve stories for your latest collection, due in a few weeks.  True enough, the stories had been written and published before, but you were in essence able to consider those as rehearsals, bringing your new profession as actor to a higher plateau than before.

You've not had more than half an hour in an acting workshop, but you make up for this by having spent hours, in fact years in writing workshops and the solitude of your composing self, trying to hone in on and occupy characters who are as unlike you as you can make them.  The more unlike you they are, you reckon, the greater their chances of helping you see beyond the limitations cast upon you by remaining yourself.

From the Birds with Love

In its own, perverse way, the story idea that comes splattering down upon you is like an unwanted gift from a most unwanted bird.  Both are unexpected messes, wanting some sort of attention.

The story mess is of a more metaphorical nature, its presence more an occasion of an "oh," of an "okay," rather than the bird splatter evoking such responses as "gross," and "of all persons on earth, why me?"

In what is perhaps a serious indicator of where you are on the scale of persons you know, have known, or know of who have written short stories and continue to write them, you have cultivated rituals which you believe will assist you in dealing with the gifts of story that come to you.  You've even encouraged such appearances, even to the point of being a bit overeager, mistaking some signs of story for the actual presence of story.  In any and all cases within your experience, the appearance of story means significant work.

The short story writers you admire, those men and women who produced work you enjoyed and, in most cases upon rereading them, still admire, make the art seem easy.  This seeming easiness reflects to a degree on your case, where you were in fact able to tell Helen Meyer, the Publisher of the entire Dial, Dell, Delacorte empire, that she should hire you because you had good taste.  

Having the taste to admire a writer is one vector set in motion.  Having the ability to understand why you admired the writer and how the writer achieved her or his success is yet another vector set in motion.  Having the ability to look at a pre-editorial work, see what additional work from the author it needs, and how to suggest this to the author is even yet another.

One out of three at bats is okay in baseball, but having one out of three of these abilities in the kind of relationship you wish to have with story is an entire other matter.  You were in over your head before you realized it.  Even hitting the extreme depths of alcoholism or drug abuse plateau or rock bottom was not sufficient to stay you.  As you began to study writers whose work had at first caused you the false sense of comradeship with them, you began to understand the work necessary to remove obvious traces of work. 

 Some of these traces were a compelling style, other traces had to do with the use of vocabulary, while yet other traces were tendencies to go romping off on a metaphor, which required yet another metaphor as proof of the  cleverness that seemed to roll off your back like the water from a freshly bathed dog.

No wonder the years from about twenty to about thirty were so fraught with the growing sense you'd been caught out, attending a party to which you'd not been invited.

Your good fortune was the effect of the nineteen- and twenty-=year-old braggadocio you put on got you into and around enough places to last you for a few more years, wherein people thought you unusually precocious.  Neither they nor you were able to pin down with accuracy what you were precocious at:  confidence.

You naturally identified with men and women who were prolific, leading you to think you were prolific because you wrote a good deal as opposed to writers who not only wrote a good deal, they revised and reshaped the things they wrote.

The thundering convergence of technique, theme, voice, and attitude you were able to associate with other writers never quite came for you with the same sense of momentous arrival and presence as it seemed to have come for others.  Consideration of this led you to understand how it was that persons who wrote blurb copy for dust jackets and for publishers' catalogues were, in effect, skilled at advertising.  Their job was to make you think what you were reading was momentous and significant and talented.  What, after all, is relent but a gift from, if not the birds then surely the gods.  Which gods? 

At one point, you felt yourself in serious competition with such short story writers as John Cheever, Louise Erdrich, Irwin Shaw, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Eudora Welty, James Joyce, and William Trevor.

That, too, missed the point.

Now that you are better able to appreciate what they do, these worthies and others like them are showing you how far you need to travel in your own quest to make it seem as easy as they do.

A Voice a Little While Ago (Una voce poco fa)

Your world was cheerily exploding deadlines about you as though this were a Fourth of July fireworks extravaganza.  For some days, you have been whittling away at these, and although the subject you have in mind right now is not so much a deadline as a kind of anniversary, you've thought, what the hell, why not have a go at it as well?

The matter at hand is your regular review of the order of importance in which you place the essential elements of story.  Which one thing deserves the place at the top?  Is it character?  Suspense?  Motive?  How about conflict?

True enough, story relies on all these to the point where it may well be argued that the removal of any one of them is enough to send the edifice of story tumbling like a Hollywood Hills cantilevered home after a drenching rain storm. But you have good reason to maintain your vow of listing all those elements that come to mind, then assigning them a numerical hierarchy.  Your good reason includes the fact of your most recent book splaying out over three hundred seventy such elements.

In past years, you'd chosen character for the top rank, and you'd done so in the sincere belief that story was all about character from the get go, ab ovo, as you are sometimes wont to say in a plonking voice.  Most all the other essential events can in some way be given a direct link to character.

But then you moved on to what you'd come to consider the one element that determines and defines the characters.  Voice.  Tell a story in one voice, it is a tragedy.  Tell the same story in another voice and it becomes transformed into side-splitting laughter.  Voice, you argue, determines the sorts of characters to be brought into a story.

You've squirreled away some moments of relaxation and rebellion wherein to consider your choices of rank, but the jury was scarcely dismissed to deliberate on the arguments before you, in a flash of prescience, understood that they had indeed reached a verdict.  When they all settled into their seats, you polled them on their decision.  

No surprise.  Voice won, once again, and did so for reasons beyond your last deliberation.  This time, you want voice to reflect the significant number of polarities inherent in our culture.  Perhaps there were no increases in the number of polarities, rather then the matter balanced on the growing disappearance of "things we no longer talk about."

Not to worry about the disappearance, the melting, if you will, of nuance and subtext.  There are still any number of things deemed best left unsaid or reserved for special moments between partners or, if you will, conspirators.  significant among these, you believe, is race, closely followed by gender, which is being edged along by the near paranoid fears associated with the g-word, government.

Today's equivalent of the n-word is Big Government, capitalized to emphasize the stress on the concept.  BG is the source of all our social, political, and financial ailments, its polar equivalent, BB, or Big Business, getting a free pass on taxes and, for all it has been anointed with the status of an individual, its failure to observe with any comity the Social Contract.  BB has done its best to marginalize the Social contract, having some success in causing it to be equated with Socialism.

You, who do not always intend to turn political seem always to do that very thing.  You are political and it shows.  Like some of your acquaintances who are, by degrees conservative and Libertarian, you are by degrees Progressive and More Progressive.  If in such matters as your book reviews or essays where there is no political center, you nevertheless sound like a Progressive.  True enough, there are times when your open discourse has a ring of civility to it, but in fact you are no more likely to change your views than are your polar opposites.

Things grow grim for you when, within the arc of a story, you find yourself being properly accepting of characters who are likely to be contrary to your own beliefs.  The writer's social contract protects them from your spleen.  You are under obligation to be as understanding and sympathetic to them as you are to characters of your more preferred stripes.

Writers such as Yeats, Pound, and Eliot exhibited traits in their personal lives for which you have no brief, yet Yeats and Pound in particular have produced work to move you to a teary-eyed admiration.  There is satisfaction aplenty in the awareness of their poetry casting light on human beauty and tenderness while, at the same time, their personal lives were as redolent as a food truck taco.

Such awareness causes you to replay moments and events within your life where your own behavior may have had less integrity than your writing.

In any case, you are led to consider personal voice and literary voice.  You can do little to change another, but you can and do work at the bringing together of the two so that you speak as you write and write as you speak, any excesses in your personal life offering no excuse or justification for the excesses in your writing life.

Sometimes, amid all the clutter and activity, you strain to hear voices, that you might render them with a blend of respect, honesty, and insight.  Amid such clutter and activity, you need to examine your own voice as well.

This Oak from This Acorn? No way.

Entelechy is a lovely word for a form-giving cause which contrasts with a potential existence.   The word came from Aristotle,  a man who had a genius for categorizing things, for seeing the potential of things in their various states. In one of his many works, Poetics, Aristotle defined the essential ingredients of story.

Thus the potency within a thing, say an acorn, to become as idealized oak as possible.  Or the potency within a group of whirling emotions and wishes to become something more tangible, perhaps a story.

A concept has within it elements, straining to be a story, relying on its energy.  The writer enters the picture by merging with these elements, taking them into the writer's consciousness, giving them a fitting form.

You sort through events about you, events you see as actual before you and as in your imagination.  There is no telling where some of these elements will originate; they are much like the volunteers, springing up in paved sidewalks or in clusters of poppies alongside the highway.

There is, of course, energy in you.  Some of the energy seems to generate from visions you have, recipes of events and details that impel you to get a descriptive paragraph or two down.  You read a passage in some book or magazine.  

There may be a lurking idea or concept within those pages, adding to the sense of something live and hungry within you, adding to piles of books and papers, causing you at night sometimes to have the most exquisite dreams, which you realize are confabulations of all those unclassified scraps of paper and vagrant ideas, seen by you for a moment or two as this entelechy or potential energy.

Then you mix actual events with scraps of reality, or you write them in some notebook or argue them to some conclusion here.  That produces occasional dreams of great happiness and the added sense of something you are working toward.

In some ways, there is a dangerous presence behind your process, arguing a part of you that has managed to elevate itself to the point where it can see outcomes before they are even pieced together.  You have no problems with working away at pieces and details to seek an entelechy, then work to help it materialize, but you want to draw a line at all-seeing forces within you that know before you do.

Trouble enough being a writer, or an editor, or a teacher.

Any Questions?

You come from a culture of questions.

As a person of extreme youth, with little in the way of experience to draw upon, you were surrounded by questions whose answers defined your status.  To an extent, these were self-defining rather than selfish questions.  You acknowledge certain questions where the answers were meant to assure you that previous gratifications were once again forthcoming.  May we have chocolate ice cream again?

Other questions ratified your growing sense of kinship plateaus, as in wondering if a person introduced to you as Aunt Vivian could possibly be your Aunt Vivian.  Were you guessing, or were there some hints that she, Aunt Vivian, your father's brother's wife, could be related to Aunt Augusta, your mother's eldest sister.  Both your parents, your mother in particular, seemed to use similar adjectives in describing both.  

Your mother's mother had a word that could be either Yiddish or German, often used by her in connection with Aunt Augusta.  Your mother told you she was sorry you'd heard the word used in connection with Aunt Augusta.  This gave you license to ask your mother if she was sorry you'd heard her use the words "cold fish" in connection with Aunt Vivian.  To your mother's credit, she said yes, she was sorry, because her relationship with her sister ought not to influence your relationship with her sister.

To your credit, or lack thereof, you said, "Why?"  Questions are, after all, the thrust of this reflection.

"Because,"  your mother said, "as people grow older, they form their own opinions."

You asked when you should start forming your own opinions, and your mother assured you you already had.

You asked if your opinions about Aunt Augusta would differ from her and your father's of her.

Your mother hoped you would try to keep an open mind.  Of course, you asked why.  "You can never tell where your friends will come from.  She could very well turn out to be a friend."

Some twenty years later, Aunt Augusta did, indeed, cause things to happen that resulted directly in your being considered for a spectacular experience as a writer for television, to which your mother said, "See."

But perhaps forty years later, Aunt Augusta accused you of having taken a number of Eskimo Pie ice cream sandwiches from her refrigerator, to which your mother also said, "You can't say I didn't warn you."

The big question of your culture is Why?  Because yours is a questioning culture, asking a litany of questions from which some sense of direction and purpose may be taken.

Perhaps this question has its origins in the big question you, as the youngest, were supposed to ask at the Passover Seder:  Ma nishtanah ha-laylah ha-ze mi kol ha-leylot?  Why is this night [Passover] different from any other night?  There were four answers, describing the things "we" did differently.  For instance, All other nights, we eat bread or matzoh.  On this night, we eat only matzoh.  For instance, All other nights we eat all manner of vegetables and herbs, but on this night, we eat only the bitter herb.  For instance, All other nights, we do not dip our vegetables in salt water, but on this night, we dip them twice.  And this remarkable instance, All other nights, we eat sitting upright, but on this night, we eat reclining.

"Then why do the pictures of The Last Supper show everyone sitting?"

"Interesting you should ask,"  you father said.  "I often wonder about that."

"And why,"  you ask, "is David not circumcised in that statue everyone goes to Italy to see?"

"Interesting you should ask,"  your father said.

"Jack,"  your mother said, "don't get him started."

But you were started, asking those two dear ones hundreds of questions, which they could not possibly answer because, well, because they were questions you had to answer for yourself.
You knew your father's favorite question, which you still play out in your mind for an immediate quick-fix reminder of him.  "Hey, Annie, when do we eat?"

By most accounts, he was a patient man, sturdy in his acceptance of some of the discomforts born upon him during his final years.  But any overdone ritual was for him the equivalent of wasted adjectives on the ritual of communal dining, family and friends, passing the serving dishes, him looking to see each of his guests was aware of all the possibilities within the cornucopia that was meal time.  If he had a mantra, it was, "When do we eat?"

Now, in these days, it is your habit to set forth a class with some brief lecture, some expression of the day's subject, and its relationships to the craft of reading, writing, thinking, and feeling.

"Any questions?"  you will say, and you will hope there are a few to get the conversation going, the opinions stepping forth, defenses and shyness disappearing like shed clothing as the subject begins to tumble from the cornucopia that is the classroom of experience.

Expecting the Unexpected

Because story as oral tradition extends back before written language, there is an extensive history of things well-meaning persons and, yes, bat-shit crazy persons have said about it, in ways that never cease to irritate you, whenever you hear them.

Among these irritants is your absolute favorite, the observation to emerging writers (and presumably to established ones) to write only about things you know from first-hand experience. What a splendid invitation to grind the teeth, emit a loud groan, and shake the head in the belief that any and all of your misguided stupidities and errors of the past, the present, and those you are yet to commit, are trumped by this meme? 

Had Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) observed this dictum, there would never have been Tarzan because Burroughs never set foot in Africa, nor would there have been some eleven novels set on Mars, because--well, because.

For that matter, Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was never known to have set foot on the red planet, yet he produced among other titles The Martian Chronicles, and brought those distant, often fiery orbs of stars and moons and planetoids within such easy reach that we are still able to gaze skyward toward configurations and phenomena we know by name.  The silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun were splendid enough figures of speech in Yeats's poem, "The Ballad of Wandering Aengus," but for many of us, they are real, tangible gifts from Bradbury.

Must not forget Jules Verne (1828-1905), who took us on a Journey to the Center of the Earth, was not content with that and subsequently took us Around the World in Eighty Days, from which ventures he considered it same to send us along with Captain Nemo Twenty-thousand Leagues under the Sea.  Try explaining to him that one should write only from direct experience.

Try, for that matter, explaining the concept to Herodotus (485-424 BCE), a historian, perhaps the very first, unless you count Thucydides (460 BCE--395 BCE).  The former reported in great detail on the Persian War, without ever having been there, while the latter took on in great detail the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta.

And what about that gifted young man, Stephen Crane (1871-1900)?  Born some five years after the Civil War, yet somehow managed to produce an amazing fictional account of it in The Red Badge of Courage.  Oh, well.

But while we're on the subject, yet not to in any way conflate your own efforts with these worthies, were you to have observed such a dictum, how then could you have presumed to write, for example, the short story, "The Ability," which first appeared in the prestigious South Dakota Review, then found its way into your recent collection of stories?  The protagonist is a woman.  There are, in fact, three women characters of such significance within that story, and in yet another story within the new collection, "Mr. Right," your have two principals who are women, the narrative being conveyed throughout the point of view of one.

To toss the hot potato back to those two gents who more or less gave us the English language, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, what about such iconic characters as The Wife of Bath, Lady Macbeth, Queen Gertrude, and the luckless Ophelia?  What, indeed?

In life and in writing, you do not take comfort in the known.  You push your characters beyond limits you can conceive, watching them for clues to see how you might find some solution when the inevitable turns of Reality capture you in some existential web.

Story is the recognition that Reality has tangible and intangible surprises for you, some of which you even attempt to set aside some small budget of experience to use as a coping mechanism.  Story is encouragement to look to those who came--and wrote--well before your time for this spare change of wisdom left in the cushions of experience.  Story invites you to seek role models and, should the need arise, to step forth to become one, for yourself, for immediate loved ones, and for those whom you see on some sort of a day-to-day, we're all citizens of the same city basis.

Story is the recognition that some of your teachers were not so wrong as you once suspected nor so right as you were so willing to believe.  Story is your awareness of the bravery you recognized in your parents, long after they were no longer here to serve as reminders.  

You were a handful to them, as, in fact, you have been to yourself from time to time, but they and story served as places you could retire to talk thing over.  They meant the warmth of a meal, even if you did not agree with the conversation at the time.  The warmth of the meal took you on to the next plateau, whatever that might have been.

Fortunately for you, there were mentors, both of whom not only delighted in story, they became story and through their transcendence, showed you the way to light offertory candles in hopes of achieving some light shed on some crisis, demanding solution.

Story takes you to places where you have neither invitation nor right to be; through story you are a gate crasher, sneaking into a circus or carnival, aware of wonders, deceptions, illusions, and disillusions before you.  Story pleasures you in taking on these elements and forces, writing about them as forces humankind can deal with, tolerate, come to terms with.

One of your stories, "Coming to Terms," is about a bewildered man whose bewilderment reflects your own flashes of insight and awareness as you attempt to find balance and purpose among your own studies and discoveries.  One his way to a date that will change his life yet again, he is mugged by an individual who turns out to be a member of his own therapy group, a person himself of strengths, weaknesses and a sense of what is right.  Recognizing his mistake, he makes the gestures of concern and participation that cause this story to be so exciting to you and so filled with the promise that the unexpected need not be bad.

How can you not write about the unexpected?  And, indeed, if it is unexpected, how can you write about it from any posture of knowledge?

Location. Location. Location.

A possible consequence of having so many notebooks in varying states of composed notes, and so many works of fiction and nonfiction strewn about the studio in various stages of completed reading, is the triangulated position of where you are.  

Are you in fact looking for an existential equivalent of a GPS indicator?

Where you are relates to the geographical, the chronological, the existential, and the sense of self-awareness states you sometimes consider, either in the aggregate or on a one-by-one basis.  Your concern for such matters is close to being a default condition, absent, of course, when you are engaged in the three occupational things you do, which is to say composition, teaching, or editing.

You sometimes add a fourth situation of engagement, reading, a practice that often doubles back on itself in the form of causing you to wonder where you would be if you were not here, lost in your reading.

The notations in your various notebooks are the equivalent of trail markers a hiker would make, assurances and insurance against the prospects of becoming lost, with no tangible landmark or memory of where you were before you were here.

At the moment, you are beginning to suspect that you were bored or complacent or in some condition where your focus was not fixed on matters relating to you and your association with the world about you, which is to say preoccupied with interior, housecleaning issues as opposed to the more rewarding and connected ones of you in relationship to the world of phenomena and the world of humanity about you.

This state reminds you of times you've found yourself somewhere in the midst of a narrative where you have run out of dramatic energy.  Instead of seeking ways to reconnect with dramatic energy, much less  throw it some delectable red meat, you seek the kinds of justification  and purpose so often held out as carrots by religions, schools or ways of thinking, or philosophical approaches, which are often attempts to formulate Reality.

Formulated Reality often leads you astray, allowing you to think that a firm, steadfast persuasion is the equivalent of an individual assessment in which outcomes and consequences are weighed, one against the other, much in the manner of the Electoral College in American politics allotting votes to candidates according to multiple standards, in effect changing the rules of the game to favor of control of the many by the few.

At such fraught times, experience has shown you that the best approach is to listen for the voice that appears to be having the most fun as opposed to voices trumpeting their own rationality or practicality.

Your best voice in narrative composition is one exerting the most amused and challenging voice as opposed to the most hortatory.  An amused attitude of challenge sends the message that the narrative voice has little if anything to hide, that it is confident without being overly so to the point of the pre-World War II French, with their seemingly impregnable Maginot Line.

The humorist is the dead pan moralistic cynic, challenging ornate schemes with the recognition that the human spirit is marbled with vanity, wishes to please, and wishes to be liked, as well as wishes to be seen in the long run as effective rather than make-work or, worse yet, hollow. The humorist's approach is to exaggerate everything that smacks of triumphant, practical answers.

Practical as some answers and stories may be, they smack of the assurance of logic and common sense leading the way, their lights ablaze with candle power, to a medium that sounds as though it were canned, a sermon to be held forth henceforward as wisdom rather than the propaganda of a momentary priesthood.

Amusement is an amalgam of mischief and a deliberate choice of pleasure over some more grounded sentiment.  Fear is the hovering sense that you may not have got it right or, for that matter, that you have not got it at all.  Both are powerful allies, causing you to step somewhere away from conventional boundaries.

You cannot see the value in doing a thing that does not afford you some measure of amusement.  You are often afraid you've lost considerable velocity by beginning in a state of seriousness.

Tread lightly and you are apt to fall back upon seriousness.  Tromp ahead with a sense of tantivy, and you just might have a chance of making a point and statement you could return to at some later time with the awareness, "Well, you may not have been right, but at least you were having a good time discovering it."