As a creative, if you ask me, one of the best things that happened last year was a book. The book is a collection of observations on creativity from music producer Rick Rubin. Rick has made brilliant albums with the widest range of the biggest musicians for nearly half a century.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being offers Rick Rubin’s remarkable view on creativity and reads not unlike the Tao Te Ching. Open to a random page in either and you will find an idea as simple as it is profound.

Yet somehow, the podcast interviews Rick has done since releasing the book hit me even harder. There are dozens, and it is possible that I have listened to every one of them.

Here to remember
he sits at the sun worn table
among rock and shrub and sky.
The matters and stories back home
dry and crack in the afternoon kiln
of ceaseless alabaster sunlight.

There is speculation that John Frusciante — the guitarist most renowned for face-melting licks with the Red Hot Chili Peppers — is a modern day Jesus Christ. While this speculation is largely fueled by a few photographs of John floating around the web dressed as Jesus, I’d like to add to the internet that the similarities go deep than appearance.

While I am half-joking, I am also half-serious.

With the turn of each year, I find great benefit and long-term orientation in reflecting on the one past and envisioning the one to come.

While a new year is an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is a regular mark of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems an ideal reminder to zoom out of the day to day and look at the big picture of our lives.

That said, I don’t believe in resolutions or overly focusing on specific future targets. Rather, I liken the process to “stopping for a few minutes to study the map, check that we’re heading in the right direction, and boldly continue with the journey of life.”

You ever see those Buddhist monks
who spend months placing grains of sand
into those intricate mandala art pieces?
Once finished their masterpiece is
ceremonially shown to all who wish to see.
Everyone attempts to preserve
to photograph or at least remember
what will soon no longer be.
Then the monks sweep their masterpiece
into a pile and scoop it into a bag
to be poured into a nearby river.

I don’t believe that I’ll live to grow old. 

It’s not that I think I’m going to die young or burn out before thirty because I’m living so hard or something. I just know all too well that life could end at anytime.

When I was sixteen years old, a mosquito bite nearly killed me. A few weeks after this unbeknownst bite, I went to bed with a piercing headache. If it wasn’t for my mom’s investigation of “strange noises,” I would have been dead the next morning.

This mosquito, it transferred a virus to me. A virus that infected the fluid surrounding my brain, causing it to swell and squeeze. The result: many grand mal seizures, four days in a coma, a stroke, and a damaged brain.

Ten hours a day for ten days straight, I sat meditating (or attempting to at least). Not to short-change past endeavors, like recovering from a brain-damaging stroke or pedaling a bicycle across the United States, but it might have been the most intense, challenging experience of my life to date. It was also one of the best.

What follows is part story, part review: why I signed up, my experience, and why I believe that—if one can handle it—a ten-day Vipassana meditation course is one of the best experiences a human can have.

I found myself frustrated and stuck in Las Cruces, New Mexico last week.

Due to our federal government shutdown, I was locked out of White Sands National Monument and driving down to Big Bend National Park wasn't any more promising. Congress appeared gridlocked. The weather was uncharacteristically cold and gusty—and when I say gusty—I mean blow the lid of your peanut butter jar away at fifty miles per hour while you're making a PB&J kind of gusty.

Cold, confined, and unsure where to head next, the realities of life lived from a vehicle seemed leveraged against me.

We all know some things are so small that we can't seem them. But what we often forget to consider is that some things are so huge we can't seem them either.

I would like to point out one of the latter to you.

This was a discovery years in the making. I encountered a piece here, a piece there, wondering for a long while what they meant in relation to each other. The first piece I picked up about three years ago reading one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In all the books I read, I circle passages that I find useful or profound and write each down on a 3x5 index card after finishing the book. I have well over a thousand of these cards now. Most are useful or convey remarkable insight, but one particular card from this novel pointed to something mysterious, something I wrote down in hopes that I might one day understand:

This is my second annual review, a sort of yearly glance at the map to better understand where I've been and where I'm going. Looking back at last year's review, it seems I hit seven of the eleven goals I set for 2016, which I'm quite happy about. If I'd fulfilled all of them, I think that would mean the bar was set too low.

This post is a bit more of a plot summary of my life, rather than lessons or ideas taken from it that I usually share. However, I tend to enjoy a bit of background information on who writes the things I read. If you do too, read on.

I tried to focus as the professor droned on about enzyme structures in biochemistry class, but I constantly drifted towards it. It consumed my thoughts as I ran. It filled the moments before I fell asleep and the dreams afterwards. I couldn't stop thinking about all I had to say.

I couldn't stop thinking about this website.

A string of events led to this obsession. It started with a mosquito bite. That bite led to an infection of the fluid surrounding my brain and spine, causing it to swell. The pressure caused seizures and a brain-damaging stroke, which began a multi-year struggle of rehab and dedication towards returning to the “old me.” Around the time two years had passed, I began to wonder if I'd made it back to normal. I thought about that a lot. One day, I asked myself the right question, which stopped the wondering altogether—“Why stop at normal?”

I've been posting every Wednesday on The Living Theory for the past couple months, but today, I'm afraid I don't have anything ready. Each week so far, I've managed to find an idea that consumes me and come to some conclusion I consider worth sharing. Other times I write something useful that I think could help a lot of people, but this week, my ideas just didn't come out right.

I actually started three different articles and got a ways into all three of them, but I'm still unsure where they ultimately lead and I've yet to nail down the biggest take away from each idea. So rather than rush a worthwhile idea to a worthless conclusion, I decided I'd just say: it'll be here next week.

I posted today anyway, because I do have a worthwhile point to make on this very subject:

I'm not a big believer in setting rigid and specific goals. The best things often come from unexpected places or in ways we don't foresee until the future we're attempting to plan for has become the present.

However, as 2015 has come to a close and a new year lays unwritten before us, I think it's beneficial to reflect on the year past and consider how we might best use the time ahead of us. Not to chart a path and blindly follow it, rather more of a stopping for a few minutes to study the map, make sure we're heading in the right direction, and boldly continue on in our journey of life.

A couple days ago, I broke out a notebook and made a few lists. Lists of what I did over the past year, what went well, what didn't, and what I want to carry over into 2016.

Last week, I went on a run, as I often do. However, this time I did something different.

I took a different route, at night, both aspects unusual for me. The usual warm feel of sunlight pressing on my skin was replaced by a brisk chilliness.

I rounded a street corner, about a mile into the run, and found myself within twenty yards of the freeway. Running, I paralleled the freeway, close enough to the passing traffic that I could really sense the surprising speed of each car.

I had a thought:

Okay, so you're probably not going to win your first half marathon, but this program almost put me among the top 200 runners who started separately, in some elite pack before the other 8,000 of us. Seriously, I'd never even entered an organized race before, I just followed this schedule religiously, then went out and ran. I came in 254th place out of 8,300 runners in the San Diego America's Finest City Half Marathon. Stick to this training program and I'd bet you'll have similar results.

Before we get down to it, a couple things:

Alan Watts, the man credited with bringing eastern philosophy to western civilization, lays out a simple logical argument for doing what you really want to do in life.