A reader asks Matt if it is better to have a bold entrepreneureal spirit or to be someone who provides for their family with a steady job over the years.

Matt responds:

I don’t think one path is higher or lower than the other.  It just is what it is.

We as individuals are a product of our own individuality.  We all have our own gene structure; therefore we are all unique.

How we perceive things is infinitely important.  I was interviewed not too long ago, and the interviewer wanted to know, when I was at the height of my business career, and Martin Luther King, Jr., was marching in Chicago—if I was really for all the things I espoused, then why wasn’t I there marching with him?

I think that was a fair question.

The reality is that in my business life, my overwhelming concern was taking care of the bereaved, and serving families:  thousands of families instead of just a few.  It was born out because for the hundredth anniversary of funeral service, our operation was voted the best in the nation by their own peers, five years in a row.

I probably didn’t even know the majority of what was going on in the civil rights movement of the time, because I was so involved in what I was doing, and what my own mission was.

So the interviewer’s follow-up question was:  “Did you ever regret that?”

And the answer is:  Absolutely not.  I could find a good excuse to go back to the bottle if I regreted everything I did.  I can change the future and the present, but I can’t do a goddamn thing about the past.  It is what it is, and it is for many different reasons.

To some people, absolutely no matter what you were, if you want to go around judging people, you could say:  “The President shouldn’t be the President; the doctor should have become a veterinarian...”

We love to make people’s lives fit into who knows what.  That’s part of being human:  trying to clone ourselves and tell other people what to do.

The other reality is, we each have a task to do, and it’s not static; it takes many forms and follows many roads.  You don’t have to continue doing the same task for the rest of your life.

The spirit talks in many different ways, and no matter how insignificant we may think something is, nothing is inconsequential.

My whole art career is based on what I did as a livery driver, and carrying garbage, and shining brass as a funeral director.  If someone feels they could not live with themselves by following an art career instead of becoming a political or business leader or clergyperson, that’s exactly what they should do.

What’s the use of being a great painter and hating every minute of it?  What’s the use of being a great businessperson and wishing you were riding a horse into the sunset?

I would say, “Follow your bliss,” but I recognize that we all have to eat.  And very possibly, if your bliss doesn’t include anybody else, then maybe that’s why there are so many divorces.

Matt