weddings, knowing that these, too, will at some point wrap up. The temporary things in life have brought you peace before. Your heartbreaks have been temporary, your injuries have been temporary, your confusions, resentments, anger, and fears have all been temporary.
Still, realizing that nothing we know and cherish today will last forever can be difficult. We’re on borrowed time. My mother says our number of breaths has been predetermined.[1] Irrespective of the allegory, analogy, or belief, we’re not going to last. Not in the short term or the grand scheme.
That realization might make us want to hide in the nearest corner, assume the fetal position, and scream, “Why bother doing anything? What’s the point if it’s all going to end?”
So now that I’ve massaged your existential dread, I’m supposed to teach you to find beauty in this world of temporary, right? Wrong. You’ve had your near-death experiences and promised to live a new life, only to fall back into your whack habits a few days later. You’ve lost things that mattered to you, people who mattered to you, and you’re still here, knowing that one day you’ll also be lost; no one makes it out alive.
What I can do is help you see how recognizing that everything is temporary can take a lot of the pressure off and help you jump headfirst into life, finding more reasons to be grateful, to connect with others, and most important, to connect with yourself. In the past I’ve written about letting go to gain more. This time, let’s talk about how much we lose from holding on. Let’s talk about the gifts we receive when we lose, and how all of this can help us clean out our closets and keep only what’s most important. Let’s talk about how we should value something because it’s temporary, including our own lives.
Looking at life through the lens of time shows us how patience is a superpower. Loss feeds love and encourages us to look at the bigger picture.
Nothing lasts forever, and that’s both tragic and comic, depending on how we look at it—so how we look at it, our perspective, is the thing we can, and should, control. We can give ourselves a facepalm when we look at that old outfit, or we can try it on and dance around the room summoning up the spirits and smiles of yesterday—a beautiful reminder of how far we’ve come.
Shit had hit the fan. My rap career had launched, but not at the rate I’d expected. I had moved into a condo I couldn’t afford the prior year, planning to pay for it with future funds I assumed would come pouring in. Suddenly I realized I’d spent twelve months sitting in smoke-filled studios, making music whenever inspiration (or the weed) hit me, having no idea how to pay my mortgage. I was broke and uninspired.
Things needed to be different. Not only did I have to audit my bank account, but I had to audit the people I spent my time with. We all go through these times in life, when we have to slow things down, reevaluate, and do some spring cleaning. Yet for me, this spring cleaning was less about holistic renewal and more about clearing my professional path. I decided that if someone wasn’t helping me get to where I needed to be, then that person most likely was getting in my way. I didn’t make any proclamations or write anybody a Dear John letter, thus liberating myself from their harmful clutches. I didn’t say a thing to anybody; I just stopped engaging with people who I felt were standing in my way rather than helping me and I began to focus more on myself.
I started with the people in my life who were less than inspiring, even toxic. The ones making decisions that didn’t feel responsible or sustainable to me. You know the people I’m talking about: the ones who feel like more of a chore or an obligation than a friend.
Purging these kinds of people from my life had immediate benefits. It freed up my time and energy so I was able to spend time with people and things that actually excited me, rather than drained me. Slowly, I cleansed my personal life of all the whack people I was spending time with. It was instantly liberating for me, but shedding friends also became addictive.
I didn’t stop there.
After getting rid of all my bad friends, I started looking at my good friends. The ones who were pleasant sources of energy yet sought out comfort through conformity and avoiding risk at every turn. They were well meaning but expressed their worry whenever I shared my nontraditional thoughts and ideas about taking risks and coloring outside the lines. I was on an entrepreneurial journey, and as sweet as those people were, I realized that I no longer had things in common with many of them. I decided I needed to surround myself with people I wanted to be like: self-employed, empowered, risk-embracing. In other words, I wanted to be around people only if they could help and inspire me on my journey.
No friend’s feelings were harmed in the making of Humble the Poet, at least not in my self-indulgent, apathetic eyes. Because of my financial strain and the slowdown in my inspiration, I felt like I was in “sink-or-swim” mode, and even the good people in my life were slowing me down.
If you want to go fast, go alone …
—African proverb
I wanted to go fast. I wanted out of the hole I was in. I wanted fresh air. I was sick of being broke, sick of losing, sick of being betrayed by people after believing their empty promises. I needed to figure things out by myself.
Fuck everybody else.
Everybody else, unfortunately, included Boomerang.
Boomerang was a friend of a friend. Though that friend disappeared abruptly after being caught making uninspiring decisions, Boomerang remained.
Boomerang and I soon got to know each other on a deeper level. He was a sweet guy, and we had a lot in common. He was making beats as a side hustle and loved a lot of the same music I did, and in the later stages of our friendship, we bonded over the betrayal we both felt from our former friend.
But Boomerang worked in insurance, or finance—something to do with money and sales. I didn’t take the time to understand because none of it sounded like it was beneficial to me, the aspiring rapper and artist.
We wouldn’t hang out one-on-one often, yet Boomerang came to every event I threw, alongside our ragtag band of creatives. He was always there, front and center, alongside other artists who were integral to the creative moment we were all a part of. He put in the time and the effort.
Every so often he would send me a message asking me to hang out with him, and I would be either out of town or too busy working on something to be social. I always told him I would get back to him soon, but never did.
Boomerang never took it personally. He still showed up at the events, still showed love, and still regularly reached out to check in.
One cold January night, right before I was headed to LA for a few weeks for work, I contacted him at the last minute to hang out. I was in his neighborhood and figured it was convenient to stop by. We spent less than an hour shooting the shit and catching up. I didn’t stay long because I had to prepare for my trip, and I was basically squeezing him in before heading to the next thing. But we had a good time: he loved hearing stories and always asked the kinds of questions that made me know he was genuinely interested. I realized that Boomerang’s only intention was to hang out with good people. Just as he reached out to me regularly to catch up, he made efforts to stay in contact with all his friends. He, like everybody else, just wanted to be around great energy.
