Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

Sometimes, as you’re rushing through life, something happens that you’d never expected. You behave out of character. Your blueprint of life changes orientation. No, it ceases to matter.

You know those signposts are reading different, passing you by and you’re lost. But you don’t care.

Sometimes, as in such moments, being lost is what seems to have been the purpose of life all along. You live intensely, feel intensely, almost as if you’re in another’s story. A string of perfect moments strung into a story that you’d thought was the product of wishful thinking by some unsophisticated imagination, not possible in real life. You’d say it was too cheesy if it was in a story.

And yet here it was and you were in it. Life as it was happening. Life not just as it was supposed to happen.

Do you choose to live or do you choose the blueprint?

To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

For most of us, the flame comes but for a brief period.

No matter which way you go, you’re doomed. If you choose the blueprint, you lose that which perhaps could have been. If you choose to burn intensely, you burn a part of yourself into flames and it dazzles you like no other. Every subsequent moment always pales in comparison to what was or had been and presents itself as something to just get by. And you lose a part of yourself in the flames that can never be recovered.

Not everyone can burn. Not everyone is capable of ecstasy.

But not everyone can live with a blueprint. Not everyone can keep themselves from getting lost.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

So does life. And love. The real tragedy is to see the gemlike flame and not recognize it as such and try to measure it based on the coordinates of our carefully charted blueprints.