It was a mild sunny early Summer day. As my friend David Heath took this picture of me (which I now use as the Roland Tec Inner Circle email banner) a woman walking by shouted that to me with great urgency.
Get outta the road! You wanna get yourself killed?
I had just asked David to snap my pic. We'd been walking along one of the sleepy blocks around Yale in New Haven, CT, on our way from lunch to a favorite gelato spot. As soon as I saw the stencil along the edge of the sidewalk, I was in love.
In love with the message.
In love with the image of some transgressive artist marking up the streets and sidewalks of New Haven with a message of peace.
In love with the alignment between this found moment and my overarching philosophy of how to be a creative person in this fractured world.
And in love with the joy of sitting down on the street for no reason other than the wonder of stumbling upon something that inspires you.
Now that this image has morphed into a kind of logo for my brand, the shouted warnings of passersby take on new meaning.
Get Outta the Road! You wanna get yourself killed?
For anyone making their own way as an artist these days, the road can often feel treacherous.
We might sit in the road of our careers waiting years for even a bicycle to ride by.
Or we might sit in the road and enjoy a steady flow of pedestrians and traffic coming this way.
Or--god forbid!--we may just have found a spot that suits us when around the bend--boom!--a delivery truck mows us down and we lose everything.
So I suppose you could choose not to get in the road, not to risk rejection, criticism, the disdain or derision of your peers. But I'm pretty sure that getting in the road, at least for a few minutes, beats the hell out of standing at a distance, safely protected from the potential danger of oncoming traffic, never having risked a thing. Until one day you die, never having even tried.
Take a seat. If you're uncomfortable, you can always get back up. But you'll go to your grave knowing that at least you gave it your all.