Having Faith in One's Own Sense of Direction

Today has been a glorious day of solitude in Manhattan. I slept in and was forced to stay in hibernation until the rain let up around 2 pm. I ventured down to Starbucks on 16th and 1st and enjoyed a bagel and coffee and perusing the (now free!) internet. After that I wandered over to Union Square and pawed through all the fashions at Forever 21 while simultaneously making mental notes of the fashions on the bodies around me. I worked my way over the square to Barnes and Noble and continued to people watch and look at books. I picked up 2 on writing and decided to investigate their prices on Amazon.com before purchasing. I saved $10 by doing that bit of research. Yeah! I ventured on to Sephora, Chipotle, Strand Bookstore and then finally Crumbs. Talk about some of my favorite establishments.

Bookstores always remind me of how much I don't know. And remind me how much knowledge there is that I'm dying to learn. I want to read about starting my own business, cooking, travel writing, new media, memoirs, Shakespeare, foreign languages, classics that I missed out on during school. There is so much more to know, yall.

And I'm reminded when I'm in this city that there is a great big world out there that I don't know anything about. There are languages to learn. Continents to visit. People to meet. I have this insatiable desire to explore.

I am currently reading this book "Writing About Your Life" (which I know sounds narcissistic) by William Zinnser (but really! here's the justification) 1. My favorite books are memoirs. 2. Zinnser's other book "On Writing Well" is one of my faves! Anyway this is a portion of an essay reprinted in "Writing About Your Life" that Zinnser wrote for a column in 1967 pleading for the right to fail--'one of the few freedoms America doesn't grant its citizens, especially its young people':

"We need mavericks and dreamers and dissenters far more than we need junior vice presidents, but we paralyze them by insisting that every step be a step up to the next rung of the ladder. Yet often the only way for boys and girls to find their proper road is to take a hundred side trips, poking out in different directions, faltering, pulling back and starting again.
'But what if we fail?' they ask, whispering the dreaded word across the generation gap to their parents, back in the Establishment. The parents whisper back, 'Don't!'
What they should say is: 'Don't be afraid to fail.' Failure isn't the end of the world. Countless people have had a bout of failure and come out stronger as a result. Many have even come out famous. History is strewn with eminent dropouts, loners who followed their own trail, not worrying about its unexpected twists and turns because they had faith in their own sense of direction. To read their biographies is exhilarating, not only because they beat the system but because their system was better than the one they beat."

Long live side trips.