Letters from sea: Burn the playbook

A new year's wish for us all to walk the wild paths

For a minute there, I forgot. The last year has been one that somehow took from me the hope of possibility, leaving me with no certainties to cling to except the vague sense that my chance had passed, my world shrunk down to nothing but a list of all I can never do now because it’s far too late. For a minute there, I found myself trudging through the sticky swamp of doubt and indifference and complacency and disembodiment. For a minute there, I fell asleep.

This was, in part, due to a particularly challenging year of life on the ocean — they say that living on a sailboat will deliver you both your highest highs and your lowest lows (can confirm), and each new low felt like a sledgehammer, a blow to an expansive and equanimous interiority I spent years cultivating, chipping away at my confidence, hope, and internal peace. But this chipping away was also, perhaps, in part due to the universal experience of age and time, of no longer feeling or considering myself as particularly young — that subtle but notable transition when we start to regard the years behind us as holding more possibility and life than whatever perpetually shrinking years ahead of us might.

Maybe it’s time that does this, but maybe more accurately, it’s our culture’s structures of time — the idea that we are only gifted a few short, specific windows in which particular choices must be made correctly in order to do life right. An idea of time that tends to usher us all swiftly and obediently into the same patterns, hitting the same milestones on the same schedules, wanting and working for the same things, reaching desperately for the same celebrated outcomes. And here I was, after intentionally or not-so-intentionally setting fire to just about all of those standards and pillars of accomplishment, standing in the ashes of it all, and for a moment there, I panicked— wondering if I had just incinerated my entire future.

Can you feel the tightening? Do you notice how close the walls have become? Do you sense how much your vision has been shortened? Nothing will stunt your growth and shrink your life and limit your vision faster than believing in the playbook more than yourself. I know this, because this is where I was, for much of the past year.

But beneath this scorched ground of confusion and concern, something was finding its way back up to the surface within me — something a lot more wild and alive than whatever stood there before. And through the last few months, I have woken up in full bloom, in the most grounded, connected, and embodied place I’ve ever been.

In our quest for safety and stability we can easily be swept away into a world where all our imagination and passion are so softened that they gradually erode away into nothing, and my hope for all of us is that we watch the way time and culture convince us that this dulling and shrinking is wise and responsible. I hope that we remember that while feeling safe is important, it should never come at the cost of never feeling alive. And as we enter into a new year, my wish for all of us, including myself, is this:

I hope sincerely for each of us that something we’re doing in some pocket of our life, no matter how small, feels a little wild — dare I say, even a little unwise. I hope we have a sense, somewhere, that we have found an edge, a primal engagement with the most basic but eternal elements of life. I hope there’s a place where we’re running on instincts alone, a place where rules are burned in favor of following a curious enthusiasm towards something alight with passion and intrigue.

I hope that in some corner of our lives, we are out there, sometimes on our own, sometimes in good company, running along a thin line between risk and reward with a smile on our face, where we’re entranced by the primal chase of something real, a place where we are, for once, pressed all the way up against the essence of our aliveness. It could be through art, through words tearing through you and out onto paper, through you tearing through the wind on your bike, through love.

What is possible, really? Where can you give yourself the gift of an encounter with feeling, with fear, with fun? Where can you invoke the freedom and focus of being a little kid again, so close to landing that first cartwheel that you can’t wait to dust off and shuffle up and give it another messy go just because it feels like nothing else exists in the world for that split second that you are lost to being? Where you feel like your whole life is stretching out in front of you in rainbow technicolor, overflowing with exciting turns and choices and moments?

I hope there’s a place in your life where you have been given no map, but yet you charge into the dark woods and trust the trees and light to guide you. I hope there’s a whole side of your world where you live like no one is watching. Be sure there’s a place, somewhere, where you are doing it for you, even when it breaks every rule in the book, even when no one understands. This doesn’t need to be frenzied or even effortful — it can be quiet and slow and soft. All it requires is that a vision of what could be runs so strong in your veins that you are willing exit the highway you find yourself on and instead walk your own path to your own summit to take in the view that perhaps only you find astonishing and moving.

We must remember that what’s current isn’t permanent and our future holds some magical turns for us, yet. I don’t know who or what I want to be when I grow up, but I know that I don’t want to be bitter or cynical or chronically defeated or disappointed. I want to retain the energy of my youth, not necessarily in physicality, but in spirit, in my own wide-eyed ideas of what could be possible, in my own dedication to experience and aliveness and wonder and above all else, to my own singular encounter with life, one that doesn’t map neatly onto anyone else’s ideas of right or wrong, one that doesn’t follow the script or rules.

Holding every rule as breakable is a healthy way to live as an artist. It loosens constraints that promote a predictable sameness in our working methods. As you get further along in your career, a consistency might develop that’s less of interest over time. Your work can start to feel like a job or responsibility. So it’s helpful to notice if you’ve been painting with the same palette of colors all along. Start the next project by scrapping that palette. The uncertainty that results can be a thrilling and scary proposition. Once you have a new framework, some elements from your older process may find their way back into the work, and that’s ok. It’s helpful to remember that when you throw away the old playbook, you still get to keep the skills you learned along the way. These hard-earned abilities transcend rules. They’re yours to keep. Imagine what can arise when you overlay an entirely new set of materials and instructions over your accumulated expertise. […] You have nothing to lose.

-Rick Rubin

As long as we are here and breathing, it’s never too late, our chance hasn’t passed, and we needn’t attempt to fit our lives into some mass produced cookie cutter shape. We can set ourselves free at any point, make a left turn, begin again, try something else, and no season is wasted. We get to keep all the skills and wisdom we’ve earned and learned, and we get to point them at the stars, into the boundless expanse of possibility, whenever we like. We must watch for when comfort becomes complacency, when safety becomes a cage, when fear becomes our master, or when the playbook becomes our measure of a life well lived — and I hope that should we find ourselves here, as I did for a minute, that we wake up, stand up, and move around a bit — and I hope we risk something.

I hope we always remember that we are allowed to put something good on the line in the name of something more real, not so we chase some moving horizon mindlessly, but so we instead intentionally recognize that even what’s good will eventually be gone, and if we can’t look right at what feels exciting and terrifying and be willing to name it, and be willing to push something onto the table for it, be willing to risk, to try, to break the rules in honor of that which burns within us with the fire of the wild and timeless, then what are we really doing at all?

Happy 2024, friends.

xo, Taylor

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