Dear Jack,
Thank you for sharing your adventurous life with us.
Liam, Charles, Jatinpal.
Freedom and wisdom aren’t the best of friends sometimes. With freedom, there is borne temptation for the ill. However, when freedom presents itself as an opportunity to be oneself, wisdom whispers a different kind of temptation, a temptation to explore and to become.
Jack is a child of the owls. He has many paintings of them in his room and can identify the sort of each and every one of them. The nocturnal nature of the creatures harkens to his own nature as somewhat of a free spirit. Spending his youth partying and getting into trouble, there are likely many late night antics in his library of stories to tell. And despite all of that, all the opportunities for potentially poor choices, here Jack sits, alive and well in the endgame of his days. What would one attribute such survivability to? Sternness? Toughness? Luck? Or perhaps wisdom, all others included.
Jack is the epitome of a present mind. Taking life day by day and savouring the little moments, wise enough to know that luck is not prone to allegiance, and wise enough still to know how much of his health can be attributed to it. He has a tattoo of his lucky number—seven—which he laughed off, saying it stopped working years ago. Jack partied for most of his life, and the devil-may-care attitude that pervades him has led him to some interesting and maybe morally ambiguous places. These are places many of us will never get to see. Wisdom is never heard—it can’t be taught like knowledge can. Knowledge can be infinitely complex, and even still it can be transferred from one to another with enough system and facility. Wisdom, however, is often so simple when spoken aloud, and is thus disregarded as untrue. Jack, having seen things many of us will never (and probably ought never) see, has gained this special wisdom, and perhaps it is that which has granted him such a long and full life.
What Jack embodies essentially, is the heart of a free spirit. A life that has been lived all that can be lived, and feet that have been travelled in all directions to which its eyes were presented. Jack built motorcycles, as a hobby no less. A skill for certain, but like most things in Jacks life, he never took this talent as more than it was, more than it needed to be: something to be done for fun. There is genius and wisdom in that.
Jack Lucky lived the way he wanted. Even at the age of 30, Jack was still enjoying the partying life he had known for so long. And on his arm, a symbol of this lifestyle lives. A party rat. A reminder for Jack to stay sober and controlled when he is out enjoying his nocturnal lifestyle. A tattoo he had gotten at an age many leave their reckless habits behind. Jack did not live the standard life of others. He did not join the rat race of modern life but rather used his rat as a symbol for his free way of life.
Jack doesn’t care. Not in the nihilistically apathetic sense, but in such that he does not take things anymore or less seriously than they are in reality. So often people overestimate the severity of everything in life, and Jack recognizes the inherent worthlessness that we attribute so much of our modern day stresses with. And this has granted him life, a long life lived fast. Like an owl in the night, Jack has known freedom, and he has known thrill and discomfort and all the emotions less savoury to you or me, who are grounded and wingless in a cage of society and expectations. And that is his ultimate wisdom: to take life for what it is, and nothing more.
¨Be funny.¨
– Jack
Nightrider of the Nocturnal
It soars through the night when the time is right,
It seeks the proper branch where there is the most light.
However, not from the sun rather from its own mind,
For it is the great owl of wisdom, strength, and pride.
It passes its morsels of its many wondrous encounters,
To the pestering creatures below grounded in their ignorance of inexperience.
None can understand the owl as it stalks its prey of adventure and freewill,
And finds comfort in the unknown of its heading and future.
That bewilderment is power,
Power to explore,
For there are so many crevices covered by the black night,
Never kissed by the shore.
-Charles Metcs
