Born to Run

by Bruce Springsteen

Robert De Niro once said he loved acting because you got to live other lives without the consequences. I lived a new life every night. Each evening you’re a new man in a new town with all of life and all of life’s possibilities spread out before you. For much of my life I’d vainly sought to re-create this feeling every . . . single . . . day. Perhaps it’s the curse of the imaginative mind. Or perhaps it’s just the “running” in you. You simply can’t stop imagining other worlds, other loves, other places than the one you are comfortably settled in at any given moment, the one holding all your treasures. Those treasures can seem so easily made gray by the vast, open and barren spaces of the creative mind. Of course, there is but one life. Nobody likes that . . . but there’s just one. And we’re lucky to have it. God bless us and have mercy on us that we may have the understanding and the abilities to live it . . . and know that “possibility of everything” . . . is just “nothing” dressed up in a monkey suit . . . and I’d had the best monkey suit in town.