Background Music: Press Play For Added Atmosphere Petit Fleur 

Today I was writing my upcoming book, The Beauty of Now, & there are moments  that strike me with a special poignancy. Keeping a journal, somewhat consistently for the past 19 years of your life yields a unique perspective on your life. 

I was at a birthday party for my friend LeeAnn last night and I said to the parents of her husband, my friend John Leavitt, “Leonard Cohen once said you can never teach wisdom to the youth.” John’s father said in reply, “Truer words have never been said.”

Young Trevor, I don’t know how much of the truth he would have listened to. I think it’s a matter of timing. If I felt I had to prove I’d earned my stripes, and felt someone was challenging my intellect, I’d puff my chest out and over compensate for imagined injuries to my ego.

Yet if the timing was more ambiguous or poetic, I’d have considered a much wider spectrum for what the truth was about who I used to be back then. This time portal that I step through when chronologically going through these hand written paper journals, is emotionally significant. Because I feel the echoes of that child inside of me still, thirsting for recognition and still in love with the magic that circles like a halo around every experience your heart is awake enough to feel and experience on a deeper level, once the ego and pride are transcended all there is, is NOW.

I feel like that world, which I detailed so exquisitely on paper pages with bent corners, little drawings, phone numbers, and notes to myself about that era, somehow still lives. One of my favorite mystery authors, Johh D. MacDonald captured this feeling perfectly in the dialogue between 2 of his characters, Melody Chance and Cliff in the Brass Cupcake, narrated by Cliff in the 1st person. Melody, the woman Cliff falls in love with, talks about her youth nostalgically and it rings true:

“When I was 20 I was a gay little bride. Now, Cliff, I’m 27 and I’m not very gay.”

[Cliff says] ‘When I was one and twenty’ I said softly.

[Melody says] ‘Tell me about you at one and twenty, Cliff. Don’t you get the feeling that they’re still back there, in the past, the people we were once upon a time, still laughing and loving and not knowing what will happen?”

Sure feels that way, looking at the words of younger me. I even wrote stuff like “10 years from now…” and I wasn’t too far off the mark with some of my predictions of the future. Well, the future is right now, so what…now?

We continue to strive, wax poetic, and stare at the night sky imaging what it would be like to walk the surface of stars. What it would be like to see the stars from a life lived when money is no object and our sailboat rocks back and forth, waiting in the marina, for another adventure.