Every year around this time I do the annual Parlé address on the state of things with the magazine, the poetry tour and my life hoping to give people some insight on things. This year the address is slightly different, but just as important. I’d like to think you can get something from it.

Anyone who knows me personally, I mean really knows me, knows I have a tendency to be quite weird. While everyone approaches a new year with positivity and with a fresh outlook, the first thing I think about when New Years comes around is ‘whether this will be the year I die.’ I constantly remind myself that the next day isn’t promised, that old age isn’t to be automatically expected. That might not be the best approach for everyone but for me its what keeps me going even when I may want to quit.

This year death got closer and closer to home, though it decided to skip our door once again. I still saw a lot of people pass and saw people get sick that may not recover. It’s a sad world like that and any day it may be my turn, but everyday I ask myself what I’m doing to impact the world before it is my turn.

Every year I do this hoping that maybe a few people will be impacted and motivated to do something. Most of the time you never get a chance to realize who you impact, but in the last week alone I spoke to someone in prison that found Parlé and became inspired, and I also spoke to a magazine editor out in CANADA that read my address last year and used that as inspiration to create their own. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, and those 2 things were more than enough to make the end to my year spectacular.

This Parlé grind has been good this year. Issues dropped on time, changed the look, got a few ads, visited a few states, met some nice people, made some new friends. I’m STILL not where I want to be, but I’m progressing everyday. Hopefully I’m making the people around me better too. Opening up doors for them that they didn’t know were possible, showing the fam the potential, showing my team that the grind is all worth it. At the end of the day I don’t do this for me, I do it for all those people around me, those I can see and touch on every given day as well as those I haven’t met yet but may know of me or might get to know me. It’s true, life is short, and we are small specs in the overall of things but our impact and our ability to reach grows a lot further than we could ever imagine and ever see. May I impact you and may you take that and impact as many people as you possibly can.

-Kevin Benoit
www.parlemagazine.com