Life’s On The Wire

The below is an excerpt from Al Pacino’s 2024 Memoir ‘Sonny Boy’ — a book I highly recommend even if you don’t follow the actor. But what caught me in this amazing story and quote wasn’t so much the part on the wire, rather the part in between. The waiting.

In my teens I was really driven to prove myself to the world and there wasn’t hardly any waiting. I was off from sport to job to workout out to friends to homework and repeat. These are among my fondest memories because I was always “doing” and rarely planning.

As we get older we plan more. Worry more. And for good reason we’ve seen more of the downside of life and results from not thinking things through.

But I worry we, or I, do too much planning now. I am too often waiting and too rarely “on the wire.”

I almost titled this blog “The Rest is Just Waiting.” It’s sadly apt for so many of us. Waiting to go for that new job but not applying. Waiting to write that book. Or that letter to a long long friend.

Why wait? There a saying that goes something like: “if you were to die tomorrow who would you call and what would you say. And why aren’t you doing it right now?”

Here’s to doing it right now. On the wire.

“He told me this story once about a group called the Flying Wal-lendas, a family of performers who would do amazing tightrope walks, way up there, without a net. And they would sit on each other's shoulders while they walked across this high wire. Well, this one time they were doing it, and one of the guys said, "I can't do it." The whole group had been stacked on top of one another like a pyramid, and it collapsed. A couple of them fell from the high wire and died, and others were hurt or paralyzed. When the rest of the family recovered from this tragedy, they went out and did the act again. They asked Wallenda, the father, who was the leader of the group, Why? Why are you doing this? And he said,

"Because life's on the wire. The rest is just waiting."

I understood immediately why Charlie was telling me this story. It stuck with me for a long time. Life's on the wire, man.”