TOW: WHEN WILL I GET SYNDICATED???

Seriously, people, this is Globe and Mail worthy! Someone pick up my column already! I'm super amazing and you need to hire me to write pithy things! Hurry it up already! I'm waiting for my big fat cheque! =D =D =D


Eh heh. So maybe I have a big head. But, to be serious, a lot of people these days seem to be telling me the same thing, namely, "When am I going to make it? When am I going to be able to say, 'I HAVE ARRIVED!!!' Brennan?" And all I can tell them is, well, good luck with that. I'm too busy waiting for Universal Studios to call me to be a screenwriter for them. Eh heh.

There is a really good book, which I haven't finished reading, but I mean to when I find it again, and it's on a top 100 list of best books in English according to the Modern Library. It's called Henderson the Rain King. The book is probably one of the best I have ever read, not necessarily because it was the most enjoyable book I've ever read (And I forced Ralph to read it, heh.) but because it's all about the problem of asking ourselves, "When will I be the me I want to be? When will I have arrived?"

The story is about a man named Henderson, who is rich enough to have everything he could want, has a wife, children, and everything that the American Dream can provide. He still feels unfulfilled, and he decides to travel to Africa, to try and discover how people live in Africa, and if they live well there. The situations he gets in are beyond ridiculous, but the philosophical moments resonated well with me. Because all of us keep asking questions about how to listen to our hearts, and what we truly want in life, and ways to do that without failing too spectacularly. Henderson notes, as part of his malade, that he kept listening to what his heart, but he never understood it because "it said only one thing, I want, I want! And I would ask, 'What do you want?' But this is all it would ever tell me."

And I think many of us feel the same. We all have hearts that want peace, but we often feel unrest. We can't help it, our desire it to want more, to be more, to have more than what we have. The pain in this desire comes in, when, we don't know what we want. And then we can only listen to the confusion of our inner selves, and we get hurt.

The only cure, then it to live life well. And to really reach for those things we are afraid to take. Because without risk, there is no happiness.