Everything in this world conspires to keep you down.

Easily one of the first life lessons you grasp back in the days of tying a towel around your neck like a cape as you leap off the arm of the couch. Only instead of going up, up and away you…come crashing down. Curse you gravity! Undaunted you scramble onto that couch to go again.

Worse is comprehending people will not always support your leaps and flights of fancy. Your mom, trying to stave off a heart attack yelling through clenched teeth: “Get DOWN from there!” There being the good company couch, the top of the garage or a ton of other deliciously challengingly high vantage points. No sooner do you get that gleam in your eye, you begin to bend your knees when Mom, your arch nemesis when it comes to mischief says no.

So you learn, you understand.

Everything in this world conspires to keep you down.

Flight is a sacred journey.

I wonder if Superman ever takes it for granted. Having lost his powers here and there, you’d think there would be a profound abiding gratitude every time he points his fingers up, picks up his knee and darts into the blue yonder.

It’s why I enjoy watching NASA shuttle launches. Another sacred journey but the sheer thrust, the power to escape gravity, to escape a world where everything keeps you down is powerfully intoxicating. You see it can be done. Not easily, not always smooth but still achieved.

For artists struggling to leave their 9 to 5 and be and create full time, the thrusting rocket attempting to circumvent gravity—the strongest force ever designed to keep you down—is hope. Hope of a better, bolder life of free floating freedom among the stars.

Everything in this world conspires to keep you down.

Yet every now and then, somebody builds a rocket and breaks free from gravity like some sort of celestial jailbreak. With a towel firmly knotted around my neck, tongue out in fierce concentration I’m building a rocket. Ignoring the constant “get DOWN from theres” I know even if my rocket never flies, the journey to fly is just as sacred.

Transcendence comes with costs and while I may not know (or even recognize) all of them, I’m willing to pay. So I continue to fearlessly relentlessly build.

Already the stars seem closer.

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Also published on Medium.