A Fly On The Wall, February 7, 2014

Journeys of the Mind

by Jim Murchison

@JimMurchison  

I talk too much and I don't write enough. There's a reason for it. I have always been a performer first. Even when I wasn't pursuing performance as a career I was always a bit of a ham. I have written because I need to. I have a job to do and I have a deadline.  

It's nice to have a job and deadlines. There's a certain security in knowing you have to get somewhere and when you're required to be there. That is true of physical journeys and journeys of the mind.

I don't travel a lot. My Mind however travels to many wonderful places and to some dark corners on occasion as well.  Sometimes I lose the passengers riding along with me because I skip a junction or take a different train of thought and not all are on board with me. The nice thing about writing things down is you have to pause and take a breath and consider the clarity of what you are trying to say. Valerie Cardinal talked about the joy of seeing something and then taking the time to really think about what you saw and putting it on paper in her Review Squared column. 

I don't know entirely why I am on this train of thought this week, but it is likely because of the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It is so tragic when thoughts are in a room alone and the other side of brilliance turns from creation to self destruction. I feel very fortunate that I didn't get seduced  by the lure of hard drugs or alcohol. 

People feel free to comment on the death of a celebrity because of the illusion that they knew them and they are touched by the tragedy of it. Yet when the millions of faceless and  nameless fall or are passed by unconscious in the street, how quickly we judge them as losers and drains on society. The only difference is that their dreams never made it to the media but the tragedy is still profound.

So right now I have this forum where I can put down my thoughts and think about things a little more deeply. When Hoffman died I was reading some of the tweets that were pouring in. Some people are excited and want to be the first to be posted, so two or three tweets in I saw  “RIP Dusty”. So this person got the glory of having one of the earliest posts but they were mourning the death of the wrong Hoffman. That is why it is very nice to write an article. I hate getting a message that I have exceeded my limit twenty words into a comment.