By Ethan Maurice | September 27, 2020
The following is an excerpt from the August 2020 edition of my monthly Late Night Letters. Usually written the last night of each month, I sent this one out a few nights late to coincide with the five year anniversary of this blog. Reading it again recently, I realized it speaks well to the why of the past, present, and future of this project — so I thought to publish it in the blog itself.
“It’s not about a career. It’s about believing in something. It’s about prosperity. And it’s about caring and empathizing and wanting to create the best, the most true to life, the most real.”
- River Phoenix
A Song That’s Moving Me:
Sticky Fingers — One by One (Live at Cleveland’s)
Hey there!
Please excuse the lateness of this letter, I began it two nights ago but soon realized that if I waited two more nights, these words would land in your inbox on quite the milestone: the five year anniversary of this blog! Holy wow, five years! On September 3rd, 2015 I launched what was then dubbed The Living Theory with a dozen articles written while WWOOFing on this amazing little farm in the jungle on the Big Island of Hawaii that summer. A great time it was, but my have we come a long way since then.
Milestones tend to get our minds active and our necks on a swivel as we try to get a sense of where we’ve come from and where we’re going. As but a few were around in the beginning, I thought I’d use this letter to recount what this grand project was, is today, and may just be?
The reason I set out into the world and the reason I started this blog five years ago are for the most part one-in-the-same: I didn’t know why I was living the way I was living. I think I was mostly just “following the herd.” You know, making decisions by cultural standards rather than uncovering and developing my own. I had earned a bachelor’s degree and was getting ready to apply to medical school and doing very well at the following the herd method, but I couldn’t shake this nagging sense that I would get busy, stuck on a path, and when I finally had some time to look around at life and ask some big questions near its end, I would feel I totally squandered my time. If I was ever really going to figure out why I was doing the things I was doing, wouldn’t it be better to do it before I spent my time rather than after? After nearly dying from a mosquito bite in high school had made time’s value so obvious, I wanted to spend my time well.
You’ve come to know me amid an intentional adventure of the broadest swath of experience I could muster — traveling about the world, reading a wide range of books, communing with nature among the grandest of places, working jobs of many sorts, and all these other varieties of experiences — all in an attempt to wrap my tiny human head around the whole, infinite whale of a thing.
I never could have imagined how the journey would change me, I doubt anybody ever can. What I found was always different than what I sought, and often better. My understanding of the world, who I am, what we are, where we come from, where we're going, what life is, how I want to spend my time... It’s all shifted in different directions than I expected and by degrees greater than I imagined possible. Life today, five years into the journey wide feels more rich, nuanced, tragically beautiful, and wonderfully mysterious than it did before. I consider the decision to skip on medical school, cast off into the great unknown, and accidentally befriend thousands of strangers who resonate with the same things I resonate with because they type the same words into the Google search box that I typed into my blog among the most courageous, well-intentioned, and best I’ve made. It has truly been an adventure of grander proportion, greater joy, and more serendipity than I could have fathomed.
However, a year ago, I moved back home to Phoenix to learn to fly airplanes for a living in hopes of “temporary clipping my wings to acquire new ones,” and sort of got myself stuck. I figured flying would be a way to continue writing and span the broadest swaths for the long term — I’ve fallen somewhat madly in love with the lifestyle. But as coronavirus devastated the aviation industry and the new pilot job market, I stopped flying well into my training this summer. What has most randomly picked up in its place is real estate photography. In near accidental fashion, I started a company with a friend, we stumbled our way into shooting a TV show together with a drone earlier this year, and our little business is really gaining some traction now. I’ve since been inspired to become a certified drone pilot and may have found a new medium to creatively mix with writing, but ultimately, I’m a twenty-eight-year-old living at his parent’s place during a pandemic, and no matter how I frame it, the lifestyle is weighing on me a bit. I’ve had a rough go at the creative act the past year, and especially this summer. But I know one way or another I’ll be moving forward from this situation, and I intend to bring writing, this platform, and anyone who’s down for the ride with me.
Thanks for reading these late night ramblings! I love and appreciate you more than you know. Here’s to the next five years, as they ever unfold in this perpetual present.
With love & stoke,
Ethan
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