Whatever-Because | words, photographs, art, concepts… property of KJStarace (since 1997)

I always did want to be a full time creative. Maybe it was attention issues or the safety of a straightforward career that kept me a spare-time ‘writer’.

Outside of raising a family and writing in a vacuum, my focus has been on global development, sales, innovation, and building cross sector partnerships that drive social impact.

My father is a detective and my mother a spiritual explorer, both gave me intuit, social concern and curiosity that I fine-tune regularly.

I’m out on the perimeter, kind of looking for trouble.

Honestly I’d choose truth over comfort.

Being a father I’m now closer to the future and that makes me even more urgent.

For some reason, Where We’re Heading has been my chief concern — what I write about and think about, anyway. Following lines from here out to when my kids are me and their children are them, and then back to here….that future. The one you can’t worry about, I do.

What will happen will happen. We cannot change that. Or can we? This question drives me intellectually like nothing else.

My pet peeve (aka, what I ‘write’ about most) is the poverty of politics which has us pissing away so much opportunity. Living in DC for 15 years, I’m still aghast. The opportunity costs, dropped balls, wasted time and progress. Across the world, where there’s social unrest, there’s social inequity, predicated and propagated by poor leadership usually across generations. From the USA to Cameroon to Russia, those who lead are leading us with self & short term interest – ego – in mind. They generally do not serve us or the future, stuffing themselves in the now. (–Fix this and the future’s fine)

I sound angry, but I’m really not.

Whatev’s, right? Chillax. It is what it is.

Live in the moment. Life is good. Be grateful.

Yea but…

My 8-year old son said to me the other day, watching the sun come up over the Potomac: ‘the only reason I get sad sometimes is because this amazing world feels like its dying….I don’t want to see it end.’

Gulp.

All the writing I’ve (ever) done is shit. Doing it has been therapy and has turned me into an idea factory. That’s not really a job and even though it is all shit, the process of forming an opinion, being critical and constructive especially about the sort of future you want to have – this is ingrained in all of us. We can’t shut it off.

It’s philosophy we miss. What is survival of the species? We grapple with it, without touching it. We may not want to face the future but we care. It’s our instinct to improve, ourselves and the world around us. It could be the deepest thing we know.

/ / KJS. 11.17