*Typing*

When life bares its teeth, close your eyes and transport yourself to the English countryside. To get to it, you’ve got to travel a long, snaking road that weaves through a series of towns each more beautiful than the last. The moment you've had the chance to fall in love with one, it's already a whimsical shrinking heap in the rear-view mirror. After two or three more of these cobblestone heartbreaks, you arrive at this cottage where out back on the patio sits a large wooden bathtub. You spin the faucet until steam kicks into the air like a smoldering chimney. You plug up the drain. Then, you turn your attention to this magnificent sea of muted green that travels as far as the eye can see. You stand there and you tell yourself that nothing else is real save for the patio, the English countryside and the bathtub behind you. Once the tub risks overflowing, you strip down and then plunge in. You hold your breath. You feel the hot water warm you from the inside out. You reemerge, you light a cigarette and you enjoy a smoke. You wait for the wolves to tire themselves out.

On the days you don't know what to say, it's perfectly okay to say nothing at all.

There are these moments where we feel invincible, where we feel like nothing can hurt us. We're living faster than we ever have before and we believe we can live faster still. The art is fast. The money is fast. The luck is fast. The love is fast. Everything is fast. We're terrified to blink because we know if we blink we will wake from a dream. We can't hang our lives on these moments of invincibility but when we're given them we should devour them whole. We should consume these moments as if starved. We should consume them the way a lion consumes a felled beast on the safari; without guilt, without restrain, without question, without any sort of thought of tomorrow.

I don't bake a lot of cakes. But, cakes aren't something you should "wing". When baking a cake, you find a recipe and then you follow that recipe precisely.

However, if you follow enough recipes, you will eventually develop a strong understanding of the fundamentals necessary for baking a good cake. This is called competency. You will become competent in baking cakes.

Friends, family and strangers will try the cakes you bake and they will say, "Damn, this is a pretty fucking good cake."

It's around here where something extraordinary happens. You will suddenly be awarded the privilege to improvise, to imagine and to create as you please.

Nobody awards you this privilege. You just wake up one day and feel called to create your own recipe.

Competency allows for creative freedom.

There's a reason aspiring artists cover other artists' songs. It's the same reason aspiring painters recreate other painters' works and aspiring novelists rewrite other novelists' books.

They're developing competency. They're developing the skills, fundamentals and confidence to improvise, imagine and create original work of their own.

Two days after D-Day a US soldier by the name of Jack Leroy Tueller found himself scared and lonely.

Despite his commanding officer's warning of a German sniper in the area, Jack got out his trumpet and started to play. Thinking the soldier was likely as lonely and as scared as he was, Jack decided to play him his love song.

The next morning, a Jeep came up the beach carrying German prisoners on their way to England. One of the prisoners kept asking in broken English, "Who played that trumpet last night?"

When Jack motioned it was him the German soldier said, "When you played that song, I thought of my fiancé and I couldn't fire."

Jack then shook the hand of the enemy.