Maybe the emperor wears no clothes because he wants to know how it feels.

People build empires. Empires fall into ruins. Ruins are appreciated by people. People end up dying, in pain, but usually not before creating another empire of sorts from a microscopic seed within them.

The world is a cycle. We are born confused, amnesic. We runs through the greenest grass as children, eternal. Then hatred sets in for what we have lost as we are given the shabby, rusted keys to the 'real' kingdom. Some modicum of peace may settle over some. Some look directly upward and become dizzy and they never recover. We all end up underground or scattered to the wind or simply gone, another ruined empire.

The universe is a balance. There are dark stars which need hang in the heavens every bit as much as yellow suns and supernovae. Swirling chaos is beautiful. Orderliness is ugly. They each embody within them the other trait as well. A boundless space is horrifying, a single novel delightful. But that can change if we want it to.

Music has to be this way. People who only like light music or happy music are limited and inane. People who stoke the flames of adrenaline too often burn out in their own simplicity. Music has to be light and dark, fast and slow, melodic and discordant.

Dan Fogelberg needs Leonard Cohen. Tim Buckley needs Martin L. Gore. Dead Can Dance needs Swans. Crowded House and Billy Brag need David Bowie and Nick Cave and REM needs Violent Femmes and U2 apparently needs no-one and 'new country' music deserves no-one. But the principle holds. The most beautiful opera ever sang deserves the saddest dirge capable of conjuring. Every rousing, majestic symphonic climax that sends one's soul exalting amongst the angels has a counterpart, somewhere, in the most sublime pianoforte solo or delicately-fingered harp.

People who don't understand this and embrace it miss most of what life has to offer. People who don't listen to me over years and years of trying to force their eyes open and yet who convert at the drop of a pin when hearing the same thing from somebody on TV, are frustrating to say the least. These people seem to need the stamp of 'authority,' as perceived authority lends credence in their minds, rather than valuing equally what others might have to offer and, finally and most fundamentally, their own ears and mind and heart.

I've had very few people who I've been extremely close to in my life. Trying to open their minds to new and universal experiences only to find my assumed parochial insights amounted to nearly nothing, while those whom they'd never met by virtue of some vulgar fame could sway their tastes in an instant has been one of the most irritating experiences for me. It makes me feel an artistic solitude and an otherness from those whom I would truly love to see handed the shiny keys to new heights, new depths. Of sound, of mind, of character, of the living experience.

Music is just one topic I chose to illustrate my point, but it's an important one to me. Maybe the most important. Truly though: Visual art, literature, poetry, travel, cuisine, or any unopened physical or mental vista is something to be crashed into head on and just thanked from the bottom of one's heart that it exists at all. Positive (in existence) material aspects of the world never take away from what is already there; they don't ruin other things. People only believe they do. Find what you like and favor it perhaps, but keep your mind always, always open to new additions and don't shut down and die inside. Don't languish in a tiny cage of your own construction surrounded by easy interests. It's the challenges that makes one grow, that make for a full life, that make us even be alive in any meaningful sense.

Life is a circle. The clock goes round and round, a beautiful blue world makes larger loops about its parent star. There are precious few of these loops we have in front of us, whatever our age. Why not see/hear/smell/taste/touch/read/feel/do all that we can in those years? Or shall we die experientially impoverished? To the universe, or even to your siblings or best friends, perhaps, it makes no difference. But hopefully it does to those who really love you. I wouldn't call a closed mind and a settled life much of a life at all. I don't pretend to truly know anything, if that is even a sensible statement. But I feel in the core of my body that the pursuit of new delights and broader and broader expanses upon which to gaze and take stock is one of the only worthwhile things, philosophically, a person can pursue.

And when you come upon something new, for god's sake shut your mind's chatter up for a few minutes and listen. Observe. Take it all in without distraction. Breathe. Ahhhh. Do you feel that? THAT is life, and the good news is it's happening every second of every day, with or without your participation. All you need to do is merge with it.