Use it or lose it

Brainchild, "borrowed" from HauntedXing.com

I’ve been confronted with the fact that I’m a negligent mother.

No, I don’t have kids, I’m talking about criminal neglect of a brainchild.

This morning, when I should have been chanting my japa, I was checking my email. What I read there made my blood chill a degree or two, made my stomach muscles stiffen like they’d taken a punch.

Someone asked me if they could have my blog name, my blog name, for their blog.

Ordinarily, I might laugh this off and tell the person to go to hell, if only in my mind. After all, a blog name is sacred, isn’t it? It’s part of a person’s online identity, right? It’s your online presence, no? Especially when you’ve spent money on the actual domain name and a year’s worth of hosting?

The problem is, the person who asked me for my unique, inimitable, profound, evocative blog name is a dear, dear friend (although I haven’t heard from him in months, until he wants something from me), a person who has been very kind to me, who once did a very wonderful thing for me: he got me a job.

It wasn’t his fault the job didn’t work out.

He also lent me money once. A decent chunk of change, though the exact amount escapes my memory right now.

But I paid him back, so he can still go to hell. Blog names are worth more than money. I’m starting to think they’re worth more than friendship.

But wait. Not so fast. This is the reason he wants The Eastern Side:

Preaching—big preaching. The kind of big preaching I’d have the right to aspire to, if only I weren’t such a miserly ass about my own blogging. If only I weren’t such a perfectionist about writing, if only my false ego weren’t so very false, so puffy-huge, like an over-proofed dough-ball, ready to collapse at the first poke.

I admit it, I was flattered to be asked. It is an awesome blog name. At the same time, I thought, where does this guy get off?

Where he gets off is, “You’re not making the most of an awesome blog name, can I make it fly?”

This is the story of my life. The story of my “wasted potential.”

All my life, I’ve been told things like:

• You could be at the top of your class . . .
• What are you doing working in this restaurant . . . ?
• You have so much potential . . .

. . . if only you’d apply yourself!

And most recently (though not to my face), this:

She’s a nice girl, but don’t expect too much from her.

Ow.

The pain.

Actually, it hasn’t been all my life that I got this sort of thing, only until high school. Once you reach a certain age, it’s no longer “potential,” but “wasted potential,” at least from the material point of view.

I’m well past that age, from the material point of view.

So I felt threatened. Like somehow this—ahem—friend has a right to take something from me (even though he did ask nicely), that I should just fork it over because he’s bigger and stronger (in the sense of having more of an audience, more credibility), and better connected, and more diligent about blogging (though, like me, he hardly ever updated his current blog either). It’s like this blog name of mine, the very idea behind it, isn’t really mine.

But it isn’t mine, not really, no matter how much I’ve paid for GoDaddy and hosting.

Nobody owns an idea, it’s only on loan from Krishna. You can’t even copyright an idea, that’s how free they are.

Like they say about sex and money: use it or lose it.

If you don’t cultivate what you’re given, somebody else will come along and do it. All your hopes, those tender plants you nourish and water with your one-of-these-days and get-around-to-its and wouldn’t-it-be-awesome-ifs turn out to be nothing more than unsightly weeds, choking out the ideas and dreams you planted as tiny seeds. A child who is neglected becomes stunted and deformed.

Meanwhile, somebody else has cultivated a garden elsewhere and is harvesting fragrant roses and juicy tomatoes. You look wistfully from your patch of thistles and say, “That’s what I thought of, I had that idea, but he beat me to it.”

* * * *

Tomorrow:  “Staring Down the Barrel of Maya-Devi’s Gun”

And if you’re so inspired, you can share (in the Comments section) your own struggle(s) of how you let an opportunity slip away, faced a test, or turned a failure in to triumph.

Or send me an email. It would inspire me to hear about how you deal/have dealt with this problem.

Hare Krishna.

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