How often do you meet someone who claims to have monkeys in his pants? I did once. He kept monkeys in his pants to share with others, and when they were really naughty he left them at home. Home was a shelter on good nights, and most nights weren’t good nights. Most nights home was the unseen corners of the world around Chicago — year ‘round. In the few years I knew him, he never once complained about it. It just was, but it wasn’t always. One day he called out to me.
"some pull quote from the text"
“You wanna know about my monkeys? Everybody wants to know about my monkeys. Gimme five dollars, and I’ll tell you about ’em.”
There are a lot of reasons to stop in life and a lot of ways to stop. You can stop caring and soldier on. You can lose a little of yourself along the way. You can even lose a little of all of the things that aren’t you along the way. You can stop doing, stop feeling, stop thinking about whatever it has your head in a tussle, stop and smell the roses, take a break, or go full-on Bohemian and wander the world. Too often we call it quitting. Maybe it is, or maybe quitting isn’t what we think it is.