"Will they say he's a wise man? No!"

I hear Dennis Hopper's photojournalist character in "Apocalypse Now" saying, "Will they say he's a wise man…? No!"

You lug this bag of bones around on the planet for awhile. You grow older, the story gets a little bit longer. You hope you learn something. But it's not guaranteed. If I were to dispense any wisdom, it would be a few simple ideas:

1. Do the hard stuff first, you think it's a good idea to put the hard stuff off, leave it for later, but no, best to jump right in and do it. Now. No time like the present. Tomorrow might never come along.

2. Push the rock, try to find joy in pushing the rock.

3. You can't tell anybody anything. You can't really pass on "wisdom" to another person either. I'm probably just talking to myself, and even I might not really be listening. You can only lead by example. Maybe, somehow, someway that gets filtered and absorbed by someone else. But you can't take the pain away from another person, even if you'd really like to.

4. Let shit go. This one is hard. Sometimes you think holding on to shit is what makes you, you. But letting shit go is even more character defining. And the less you hold onto, the more you can be open to embrace.

5. You are time, and time passes. Lots of people and things will disappear in your life. It happens to everyone. We are more the same than different. The things we hate in other people are the things we are most afraid of in ourselves. It's a complicated human thing.

6. You can make rules, live by rules, but in the most important things - love, life and art - there are no rules. Really.