My oft-times friend is deeply in debt. Oh, not in terms of money, or goods, or anything that simple. He is in debt to a series of others who got him out of some trouble, perceived, and got him to where he should’ve gotten anyway, if he had had the…patience, the steadiness of a steady-state mentality, if he weren’t always chasing the ghosts of lost and blown opportunities; if he weren’t so brilliantly arrogant and didn’t depend on others to steer his own world.

Alas, my friend is in debt: to others who structure his own path’s successes; to the yearning to be as great as greatness itself, without having to do the things he must do, and pay-off the debts to his own… history? And who can afford to work with someone who is, in each moment, having to shift his resources to pay the bill that seems due in just that moment?

Oh, my friend is in debt to his own eccentricity, to the teachers who taught him, who argued with him, but provided him no guidance for how to live the life they lived. In debt, he is, to all the centuries of great thoughts; in debt to concepts, and unable so far, to grasp the life, the living which will lift him out of his debts to all the others, and to live each day his own life.