It Is Not Too Late.
It is never too late to be what you might have been."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
1/ The Inextinguishable Spark of Unlived Potential
Getting older conceals a dichotomy.
With each year a gap widens between our actualized selves and the potential selves we’ve left unexplored.
As such, age comes with a paradox.
On the one hand, you have lived long enough to know something of the world.
Your knowledge has deepened through experience, and it gives you a sense of orientation.
And yet you also carry baggage.
You have become who you are, but carry also who you might have been.
This does not have to mean regret.
Simply certain potentials in us have not - through circumstance, fate or responsibility - manifested.
This sense of what we could become never lets us rest.
Or rather we convince ourselves we have arrived in life while concealing aspects of our spirit in a secret chamber.
We surround this chamber with the comforts of modern life, the “rewards” of achievement.
“I’m okay with where I am now, I’ve done my bit”
And so we make peace with what it is we have become by boxing up what it is we might be.
2/ The Gulf Between Cultivated and Dormant Self
A gulf has formed between the cultivated self and the dormant self.
What we repress is the savagery of our own demon.
And make no mistake, your potential is demonic in form.
The problem is though, that demons cannot be contained.
You can lock Pandora's Box but its contents can’t be willed out of existence.
And so you sleep a deep sleep.
And it is in your sleep that you realise that certain things can know no locking.
A voice erupts from the depths.
You shoot upright; phantasmal writings on the wall, decrypted from the deep without your permission.
“How the hell have I never fulfilled this? What led to this place, where I have the world, and yet am no longer willing to place a bet upon my own life, my own dream, my own potential?”
The only thing you were ever afraid of was yourself, and you know now it cannot be jailed.
The only question is: what will you do, now that Pandora's Box has been wrenched open?
It turns out that suppression is an illusory sleep.
3/ Not Self-Love, But Self-Discovery
There is a tendency in modern “guru culture”, in fact, I think a neurosis, always to want to find the light, something beautiful.
It manifests as the projection of the perfect life; the dreariest of modern phenomenon.
And yet our potential is carried just as much by the sharp tongue of our inner devil, as the angels we seek.
The myth of the perfect life, perpetuated on social media, casts suspicion on the devil's role.
And yet our own potential is ever in league with the demonic.
"Who are you, then?"
"I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good."
Goethe, Faust
It comes to rough up our complacency, to remind us that growth is inherently an uncomfortable experience.
Is that not the experience, as one thing becomes another?
To become more yourself is to pass through a threshold.
And thresholds, being painful, are, we think, better avoided.
We are attracted to peace as we get older.
Yet what happens when we find that that peace is bland, or built on the quicksand of unfulfilled things?
And so, our demon flays us.
Not because it is a sadist.
But because the skin you’re accustomed to no longer fits.
It suffocates.
The only question now?
Are you ready to shed it?
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
Anaïs Nin
4/ Resisting the Capitalisation of Self
I am deeply suspicious of the idea of “self-love” as expressed in the modern form.
It is a commodified idea.
Just because it glows in the dark does not mean it leads to the light.
It is at least poetically complete that the diatribes of darkness one finds on the internet are offset by its vacuous pools of light.
At times I find the brutality of the dark easier to stomach than being hoodwinked by the next charlatan.
Yes, nothing is easier to dispense at the vending machine of human longing than “self-love”.
These mass-produced counterfeit realities have eaten away at the soul of society.
While incidentally earning its hucksters millions of dollars. Turns out, selling the impossible dream is immeasurably profitable.
Unless you are selling me something which confronts rather than cures, then it is not for me.
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
5/ A Living Sense of Potential
And so, I am not in pursuit of self-love, but something ever unfolding and available to us; a living sense of our own potential.
As something ever becoming, it is ever unfixed.
While the idea of self-love, may attract many, it manifests all too often in the insatiable narcissism of the modern.
Instead what I seek is the courage to delve inwards, to discover something living.
It is in the confrontation with what the devil chooses to put on my table that I find the opportunity of the future.
It is in this conversation that I find my deepest happiness, despite the way it tests and cajoles me.
It is a question which has led me to the topic of my Podcast, to explore the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurialism.
Instead of yearning for a perfect life, I am instead asking the question:
How can I change the trajectory of my life?
When I started examining this topic, I started noticing patterns in myself which I could see all around me.
Can we break out of our own chains?
To break out of the assumptions which chain us down, we must have the courage to take an axe to the irons.
And I noticed this entering my 40s; that I felt somehow trapped.
As if this version of myself no longer fit.
It provoked the question: how can I make my future other than it has been in my past?
It was a tough question, one which erupted from the underworld, but one which came pregnant with opportunity.
Why?
Because all around us we are bound by limiting beliefs.
What happens if we dare to cast these off?
"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be."
James Baldwin
6/ Mindset and Growing Older
Many of us in our 40s have bought into the illusion that there is nothing new out there for us.
We are fixed in our life.
Our script is written.
Sometimes it manifests as a tired acquiescence to our circumstances.
But its sharper edge is cynicism.
I remember at 17 getting into a conversation with a man in his 40s. He seemed so broken and I wanted to know why.
I always remember his answer.
“It’s the world mate. By the time you’re my age, you’ll understand. You get cynical. And if you don’t, you’re a fool”
And I remember thinking:
“No, there has to be another way.”
Somewhere along the way, many of us lose faith in life, and just as critically, a sense of hope.
I see this as a premature ending of our spiritual life.
Spiritual life, not in an esoteric sense, but as the belief that we can continue to grow as we get older.
I see it everywhere.
People who arrived at a dubious sense of “adulthood” in their twenties, and have been fixed in their attitudes ever since.
“Adulthood” is not something you arrive at in your twenties.
It is something you begin at.
Perhaps nothing is more misconstrued than the idea of adulthood.
Becoming an adult is a lifelong journey.
It is one of the curiosities I have found in life; to arrive in an adult world, only to find it is run by children.
When I have felt most lost or broken, it has even given me some solace.
Might your brokenness, in fact, present an opportunity?
In a world masquerading as healthy while so self-evidently certifiable, perhaps your insights, gleaned from the damned, may after all possess an offering?
Yet if there is one thing in my life that I have learnt, it is that cynicism is not a destination but a choice.
"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
Rainer Maria Rilke
7/ Investing in Hope
I set up my Podcast because I decided I wanted to invest in hope.
The devilry of cynicism is that it says that everything is decided for you.
That no matter what you do, your life cannot be changed.
Yet as I get older, believing in hope as an abstract is no longer enough for me.
I spent my 30s reconciling my spirit with the conditions of existence - mortality, loss & the question of suffering.
Yet it’s your job as you mature to break down your insights into a communicable form.
The Newsletter and the Podcast are two ways I’m transforming the abstract insights gained from a life in the arts into a more concrete form.
I am trying to unlock my own latent potential by translating the mystery into a language others can understand.
It is early in my journey and it is both challenging me and provoking me into a new form.
"When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about."
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
8/ The Intersection of Our Interests as our USP
My particular area of interest is the intersection of three things.
Let me describe them.
Imagine three circles.
The first is filled by creativity.
The second is filled by spirituality.
The third is filled by solopreneurship (a one-person business in the digital economy)
At the intersection of these three interests is an unknown area of the world
That’s where the mystery resides.
On the one hand, there is so much I know about each of these subjects.
And yet at their intersection, they clash, fuse and merge.
It is this energy I am drawn to and which I’ve made my own unique challenge to decrypt, decode and decipher.
I believe passionately that there is enormous value in this intersection.
In learning about it, I hope to help others find new pathways in the maze of their own lives.
That also presents an opportunity.
Though its shape I am as yet unsure of!
What I do believe, is that going hell for leather after exactly what relentlessly draws you, contains unfathomable potential.
At the least renewal of one’s own creative life and, at the most a keystone for a business.
Some say never tell others your intentions, it only sets you up for failure.
I say success and failure be damned: does it make your heart beat?
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.”
Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man
9/ Too Late for a "Personal Brand”?
Coming from the arts, the idea of a personal brand has always been anathema to me.
My life philosophy has been less about trying to build something specific, but rather about following the act of becoming.
And yet, in my attempt to decode what I am trying to do in the world, I am getting more specific.
So I set out my stall on the intersection between creativity, spirituality and solopreneurship.
Let me explain what each represents to me:
I see spirituality as the way that we wrestle with the condition of being human, especially in regard to our relationship with the world.
I see creativity as the way we dare to shape and express our spiritual inklings into a new and communicable form.
And solopreneurship I see as the ideal vehicle by which we can utilise our potential in the digital economy. That is put out our knowledge as offerings and get paid to do so.
The reason am doubling down on the trinity of spirituality, creativity and solopreneurship is that I see it as a potential so many are sleeping on.
This year I have noticed:
the despair of artists in the modern world
how completely ambivalent the over-40s are to the digital economy
a society so distracted by social media that it has lost the ability to concentrate
The reset I am making in my own life is a reset that I see available to so many stuck people.
But the reason I have got so serious about it - and expressing it, is that you have to dare to live what you intuit.
The first thing I had to realise?
It is not too late.
However, once you dare to actually challenge where you’ve got to, you have to be bold enough to implement the changes.
That means not just drawing into your dormant potential - which is a painful experience because you will not like everything you find there, but also fronting up to your own life.
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
Viktor E. Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning"
10/ The Basis of a New Approach
So:
The spiritual represents the universal.
The creative represents how the individual expresses the universal.
And the solopreneurship is how that expression is formulated in a way that allows us to function in the real world.
The intersection of these three concepts is energised by one thing - that is the spirit of hope.
As someone who approaches my mid-40s, this sense of hope has arrived as a form of revelation.
That the demonic voice of potential inside us does not have to manifest as a form of destruction.
Rather, we have the potential to renew our lives and to give back to the world by doing so.
This potential is ever available, ever potential in us.
For me personally, these insights have emerged out of one of the most difficult periods in my life.
I have covered this in great detail in the project I am now striving to complete - “The Isolation Diaries”
What has emerged out of this turbulence is the decision to affirm despite the darkness.
That is the characteristic of a newfound faith in life; to dare to live with hope.
However, this hope must be rooted in a commitment to action.
This is not just how we fasten ourselves to the real world, but how we deliver proof of concept.
As an artist it is too easy to linger in a Netherland, hoping the world will “get it”.
No, it is your job to break the mystery down and deliver it in a communicable form.
If you do that in a way others understand - and which brings value to their lives - then the world rewards you for it.
For me, it’s been through asking the hardest question -“Is it too late for me?” - that I have found my deepest regeneration.
Paradoxically, it is at this threshold of my spirit, that I’ve learnt that I have to enter the temporal world again; and in a way I have never done before.
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Carl Jung
11/ Spiritual Effort and Practical Commitment
I have discussed the demon of our own potential and how so many of us lock it up.
Why then don’t we simply unlock it?
Fear.
We fear the regret of what we haven’t already done.
And for many of us, regret is an animal best kept caged.
As such, we marry ourselves, subconsciously at least, to the illusory idea that if we haven’t started already, then why the hell start now?
It is a limiting belief and one we must ransack.
To do so we need to do two things.
The first is to make a spiritual effort.
And the second is a practical commitment.
One spiritual effort says;
“What can I be?”
The practical commitment says:
“What can I do”?
I have found my life extraordinarily re-energised in the clash of these forces.
Why?
Because their collision expresses the essence of the human condition:
Being vs Doing.
I conducted my personal investigation into being during the last years working on “The Isolation Diaries”.
It involved world rejection.
That is, exchanging the meaningless, fragmented, distracted confusion of the modern world, in the pursuit of my own centre.
"At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want."
Lao Tzu, "Tao Te Ching"
The ensuing project; a film, an album and a book, documents a man rewriting himself on the inside.
The product of that reformatting has been to bring me to the doorstep of my future, which is where I find myself now.
The key realisation which emerged at the climax of my isolation was that my creative life was not over.
I headed into the wild, dared to create a void in myself, and out of the abyss came renewed artistic expression.
What I chose to leave behind was returned to me.
To rediscover it though, I had to to dare to let it all go.
The ways we rewrite ourselves are not initiated by acts of doing.
Instead, they are preceded by the courage to be.
And the “modern”, in all our vigour and bustle of ambition and doing, has little courage for being.
For us, progress is always something that must be forced, rather than something invited.
It is why we hate “stuckness” above all things.
Yet nothing is more misunderstood than the critical role stuckness plays in driving forward our spiritual progression.
We resist it with all our might because we are not yet ready to hear the offering it brings.
Its voice, as hinted at earlier, is often demonic in tone, and says the thing we least want to hear.
But when we hear it, it arrives as a revelation.
It presents the action we must take.
Yet least want to pursue.
We resist it because it represents the edge.
Of what is beyond us.
But that which is beyond us provokes us into becoming more us.
In my experience, the stimulation provoked by fear is often followed by a period of inertia.
This is at time of particular torment.
When you have seen what you know you should do, but the shock of seeing it devours your energy.
It is a defence mechanism; to freeze in the face of danger.
We are not yet ready for what the world is asking of us.
That is why the call to adventure is so often met by the most profound resistance.
Even when our bag is packed and we are at the door, about to do exactly what we want to do, suddenly the voice:
“Fuck, I am not ready for this.”
"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."
Joseph Campbell
12/ Resistance to the Call
I remember feeling this at the start of my “Journeys” project.
It was 2013 and I had lost my EMI deal.
I had no idea how to go forward in my life.
And then came a call from China.
I picked up the phone.
“Jim, we have a tour for you.”
Opportunity had arrived.
It was not a case of choice.
Once you’re dropped by a major label you are done in the music industry.
This call was the only thing I could do in the world to continue my path.
And so I packed my bag.
My heart pumped.
I knew this to be the one thing, the only thing.
Those moments in your life when your life is decided by a course, simply because there is no other.
Descending into Beijing I saw the lights, the smog, the opportunity and the unknown.
The apex of my career had carried in its pocket its nadir.
Where was I NOW?
Between worlds.
And my heart hammered.
Landing represented the future.
I was falling toward it.
One moment there was expectation.
The next terror.
Otherized by my lack of choice.
Nothing could stop the descent into the unknown.
I was committed.
And knowing there was no way back, I felt mortal terror.
In those moments you would give your whole world not to have to answer the call.
Let me stay as I am, I am not ready.
And yet life calls us.
You know the only way is through, not back.
There is no one coming to walk you through the valley of darkness.
It is your journey to discover what lies beyond the threshold of your courage.
Namely:
Who you are.
Not as you were, but as you are becoming.
True self knows that it is only in meeting its calling that it can be fulfilled.
It is in this fusion - between fear, potential, calling and fate - that we have the opportunity of our lives.
That is, to become ourselves.
Not as we were, but as we might be.
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets
13/ Thresholds are not Age-Specific
I became who I am because I passed through that threshold and discovered what was on the other side of that fear.
It was uncomfortable. It was painful. It was even terrifying.
I discovered that through our fragmentation we are formed into a greater whole.
That is how it feels; to grow.
Writing about this all these years later, I understand now that there is not one threshold, but many.
Personally, I stand before one right now, as I expect you do too.
We may find ourselves at different points in a cycle, but it is a cycle nonetheless.
The point of today’s essay is that these thresholds are not age-specific but arrive at critical points in our journeys.
The idea that “It is too late for me” is just a new version of an old threshold we have passed through.
The limiting belief we encounter is:
“I should have started earlier, therefore it is too late for me.”
And it is a desperate falsity.
We present the idea that “it’s too late for me” as a truth because we are unwilling to recognise it as an excuse.
The thing that is bugging you IS your living potential.
You treat it as a demon because it comes to disrupt all that you know.
And so the world-weary part of you shuts it down.
That shutting down is called repression.
But why not ask instead:
What would it really mean to start pursuing that thing you deem is too late for you?
Well, very often there are three excuses which we use:
I don’t have the energy
I don’t have the time
I don’t have the skills.
And yet, the very confrontation with what it is you deem yourself lacking is the very area where your growth awaits.
Often “it’s too late for me” means, I am no longer willing to go through the pain of growth.
We can visualise that growth because it manifests symbolically in front of us.
Usually as a hard challenge.
And yes, the journey of becoming who you are is the hardest challenge of all.
Why?
Because it is only ever provoked into existence by answering the call of the unknown.
The road to becoming who you are is ever-forward.
And the notion that “it is too late for me” is simply an excuse we use to cauterize our growth.
The reality is that we get set in our ways.
To take on something new, especially new growth, means that we have to disrupt our own patterns.
Yet why not shake up the kaleidoscope?
If you’re lacking energy, why not orientate your life towards building it?
We don’t have enough energy because we’ve fallen victim to the modern curse - that we have no time.
Why do we have no time?
Because we have made ourselves busy to the point of madness.
And yet “busyness” is the defence mechanism we use to shut down the voice we fear most - that of our own potential.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."
Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Our modern fantasy is that if we make ourselves busy then we must be growing.
Yet we spend a life climbing a ladder only to find we’ve placed it next to the wrong wall.
What if becoming yourself means you have to start descending the ladder, rather than pursuing the status anxiety of having to reach the top?
What good is that top, if it’s the wrong dam top?
When I set out on my “The Isolation Diaries”, I determined to dismantle my own ladder.
It has been liberating beyond belief.
Not to give up ambition but to determine to live by a value that is true to me.
The modern mania does not account for the fact that busyness for busyness’s sake is a form of utter madness.
As the Buddha himself said, “Haste comes from the devil”.
And yet, we force our Yoga classes into 18-hour days to prove our spiritual life.
No, what we moderns are most afraid of, is being static.
And yet stare into the static and you notice the nothingness is electrified and full of potential.
Why?
Because static is generated by external disturbances clashing with our internal circuitry.
Its product?
A hailstorm of energy and potential!
You no longer land on the channel you were programmed to but out there beyond the voltage of the known.
Yes, nothing interferes like static, because in it you will meet yourself.
Not as you were, but as you might be.
Cynicism manifests in the person who chooses not to follow that call but is eaten by the fact he opts not to.
Or to return to the metaphor:
Deprive static of signal and it is just a TV devoid of charge.
That is: its purpose collapses into nothingness.
This is the paradox we face.
We want to hold onto our “normal”.
The voice which wakes us in the middle of the night is unwanted.
Not because it isn’t us.
But because it is too us.
"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
Nietzsche
14/ The Darkroom of Potential
And so, how do we challenge the voice which says “It’s too late for us?”
We may have to first reduce our world so that we may rebuild it.
We are afraid of stopping because static space is erratic. We will be confronted by ourselves more, not less.
And at the start, it very well may scare us.
Because we are not used to it.
We claw back time from the fates only to find that the inner voice is not singular, but multiple.
We discover these voices as doubts, and the thing about doubt is that they are like hydras.
You sever off one head and then many more grow in its place.
It turns out that we feel we were right to resist entering this space of recreation after all.
Because in entering it you have to grapple not with things separately, but with the whole.
It is in this confrontation, that we learn to know about ourselves anew.
It is the darkroom of potential.
Where all devils and all angels exist.
And in no longer being repressed, all must be welcomed.
Within this space, we often find ourselves so scared that we crave to return to that which we were before.
And yet in turning around, we see that the bridge we crossed is now on fire.
You forgot.
That in your recklessness you deemed to commit to your new path.
And now you have to deal with the consequences.
There is no turning back.
It is only at this point, in my experience, that the really good stuff starts happening.
The act of commitment is consecrated at the moment when there can be no turning back.
There is only one choice:
To go forward into the unknown.
And so off we set.
Yet soon we find can’t do it all ourselves.
We just don’t have the tools yet to cope with the demands of this new environment.
And so we reach out to the world.
And this act itself is revelatory.
Whereas once we were so fixed in our positions and so safe in our lives, now we are without orientation.
It compels us to reach out.
We are intruders in a vast space.
And it's scary.
But fear serves its own purpose.
We are ready to receive again from the world.
And the world answers, often with a mentor or guide, perhaps the first we ever had.
This new-found humility opens us in a way that we never knew possible.
And in this opening up three things become available to us:
Knowledge, inspiration and potential.
It turns out the point we were most afraid of is exactly the point we needed to get to.
Because something cracks in us.
And this crack, opened by terror, lets in something new.
It is that new knowledge that brings us to the door of what is missing in our lives.
Of course, this guardian or gatekeeper cannot walk us through that door.
They can only provide us with the key to unlock it.
Going through it we must do ourselves.
15/ The Role of Sacrifice
When it comes to the idea that “It’s too late for us”, it is often because we have become so fixed in our position in the world, that we no longer feel ready or willing for new adventure.
Yet the flip side of ignoring the call is to go into our future forever not as we could be, but as always as we were.
And to get something new in life you have to be willing to sacrifice something.
But the paradox of sacrifice is that it is the ultimate act of faith.
You do not get reassurance from the Gods that they will give you back something in return.
The exchange is not guaranteed.
That is the nature of faith!
That it’s reckless, that it’s foolhardy, that it’s beyond our seeing.
This is why living with faith is the opposite of living in cynicism.
The cynic only believes what he can see, and often this is conditioned by what he knows backwards.
The person of faith on the other hand walks forward, even while knowing that the reward they seek will likely not be the reward they get.
And this is the destination I want to arrive at in this essay.
16/ Daring to Reinterpret Failure
All too often our decision not to pursue something new is because we are imprisoned by the fear of failure.
What about going into it instead in the spirit of reckless faith?
If there’s one thing I have learnt it’s that the way that the world rewards you is rarely the way you intended.
Once the sacrifice is made you have no idea how events will unfold.
Yes, gravitate towards the goal that you set out towards.
Yet prepare for the storm to blow you to an unintended course.
Do not presume that course to be wrong.
It will just be different.
It is what you learn in the storm itself which makes you who you are.
Not the destination, but the person formed as you get there.
We want to achieve our goals as some type of token we can present to the world, as an emblem of our becoming.
And yet your becoming is not expressed in what you build but who you become while building it.
That’s your true legacy.
17/ Final Thoughts
Say it to yourself:
It is not too late for me.
You have no idea what the world has in store for you.
It will challenge you.
It may even break you.
But in that breaking you will be made anew.
Rewritten from within.
Into a shape you never thought possible.
Because that’s what happens when we enter a threshold.
We are smashed by the storm.
And in surviving emerge, not as we were, but as we were meant to become.
Out trajectory, once fixed, is now open.
It Is Not Too Late.