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Profiles - Your Stories
 Julie Mars - Imagination Is Available For A Multitude Of Uses
http://www.juliemars.com
1) What do you believe makes you special or interesting? I’m in my own time zone. I do everything at least one decade (or more) after every one else in my age range. For example, I started college ten years after I finished high school, got married at 37, took my first job with a pension plan at 45 (quit three years later, though), got my first book published with a small press at 49 (second at 54), finished yoga teacher training at 55, and broke into the Big Leagues of publishing (St. Martin’s Press in New York) with my third book at 57.
My mother always described me as “five minutes late and a dollar short,” but I think she underestimated me. It’s more like ten years and ten dollars.
2) What kind of effect have you had, or would like to have on the world?
I have two missions: I’m trying to convince the whole world, person by person, that the imagination is not only precious but available for a multitude of uses. I don’t think humans, as a group, respect the imagination enough, and I’m making it my business to change that.
The other mission has to do with fresh water - understanding its nature, preserving it, loving it, and using it wisely.
3) What events shaped or changed your life?
I’m in the “What Event Didn’t?” school of self-evaluation. But if I had to pick one specific thing, I would say it was landing a waitressing job at a great jazz club called Paul’s Mall in Boston in about 1972. Hearing the truly-greats of jazz and R&B - Miles Davis, for example - three sets a night for weeks on end does something to your brain. It helps it refuse to accept a predictable life. I was surely already on that arc, but it music-ed it in for good.
4) Did you overcome obstacles - take risks - get lucky?
I think life is one long procession of obstacles to overcome - and many of them are self-created, though plenty aren’t. I’ve definitely had my share, like everybody else. I find it very easy to take risks - perhaps because I don’t have a minute-by-minute sense of exactly what the stakes are - and I don’t look back. I get lucky sometimes, and sometimes it all falls apart until the next cycle revs up. No problem.
5) What have you done that no one would guess you'd done upon first meeting you?
That when I was in my forties I actually thought I could succeed as a used character-car dealer. I bought a couple beat up (but charming) old classics (a 1968 Mustang and a 1971 BMW 2002), got hosed, and gave up.
6) What is still left to be done in your life?
Live in India. Write a best seller. Learn to weld. Move the bookcase and paint the wall behind it the same color as the rest of the room. Witness a change in consciousness regarding the environment. Have an art show. Go to Thailand. Invent something important. Figure out how to sleep again. Perfect my hip-hop dance moves. Eat right. Visit the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. Fit into a size ten. Save the polar bears. Crank up my meditation practice to ninety minutes in the morning. Get a new dog. That’s off the top of my head.
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