STAY WHERE YOU ARE. START NOW I'm not proud of the fact that, as I lingered in the house this morning, I found myself watching THE OTHER HALF, the male answer to the popular womens' show THE VIEW. Hosts Danny Bonaduce and Dick Clark welcomed Carol Channing to the show, and before I knew it I was hooked.

I knew very little of Carol Channing -- she talks funny and she's old Hollywood, a sort of North Star for drag queens. Still, as I listened to her tell of her engagement and impending marriage to her Armenian junior high sweetheart after decades apart, I was mesmerized. Despite Bonaduce's frenetic interjections ("You keep jumping around," she scolded him at one point), Channing managed to untangle a charming, nuanced story within a medium that seldom stretches out enough to allow it.

One of her comments stuck with me. Asked to offer advice to aspring actors, Channing said, "Stay where you are and act. Go to the nearest place you can act and just do it."

This reminds me of a revelation I had a few years ago. Contemplating my life at year's end, I found myself making notes like, "I want to be a vegetarian. I want to be a writer." Then, seized by a rare moment of clarity, I responded to myself: "Stop eating meat. Eat more vegetables. Write every day. Quit worrying about 'being' some amorphous thing and just start doing. If you write, you're a writer. If you eat vegetables and no meat, you're a vegetarian. This isn't something to aspire to, it's simply something to do. So start now."

Today I'm reminded that enlightment simply is. There's nowhere to go. I'm already there. Thanks, Carol.