Neil Peart once told me life makes no sense.

It was late 2014 and we were drinking inside The Hazelton Hotel. Peart, the drummer and chief lyricist for Rush, was sipping a Macallan, reminiscing about his career and, at the time, an upcoming book, “Far and Near: On Days Like These.”

“Very few fates are self-authored,” he said. “They just aren’t.”

I was thinking about this on the weekend while trying to wrap my head around the unthinkable: a world without Neil Peart’s beats and words and philosophies; a world without Neil Peart’s books and observations; a world without Neil Peart.

On January 7, three days before the heartbreaking news went public, Neil died from glioblastoma, the same brain cancer that snatched away Gord Downie in 2017.

It’s hard to argue: Life makes no sense.

But the way Neil lived his life did.

And even in our grief, it is inspiring.

One of Neil’s mantras was, “What is the most excellent thing I can do today?”

Imagine if everyone woke up asking that. Years ago, he rented a tiny office a short drive from his home in California and vowed to do something for someone else every day.

This could be a surprise letter of encouragement to an old friend or unsolicited help for an aspiring musician or behind-the-scenes charity work. On one occasion, after noticing a barista at Starbucks was wearing a badge that read, “Be Nice To Me, I’m New,” Neil gave her a tip that likely tripled her salary that week.

These were the encounters he cherished, small talk with random strangers who had no clue they were shooting the breeze with a rock god. His face once lit up recalling a time he was gassing up his motorcycle in Iowa. A woman in a Buick rolled down her window and shouted, “I’ll pay for yours, if you pay for mine!”

“It was just one of those beautiful little moments,” said Neil, grinning. “And I have them every day. I often remark there’s hardly a day that goes by when I don’t have a friendly encounter with a stranger. That’s what touring can alienate you from — and that alienation is so dangerous.”

In the band’s heyday, some Rush fans groused about Neil dodging meet-and-greets or blowing past autograph lines. There was a feeling he held them in contempt. What he held in contempt was his own celebrity.

At the age of 18, when he packed his Rogers Drums into a wooden crate his father built and moved from St. Catharines to England to chase down his dreams — Keith Moon was Neil’s hero — all he wanted to do was become a respected musician.

But there was a distant early warning.

“One time when I was living in England, when times were tough, a friend said, ‘Look, we have a job at a cocktail bar, playing for a bunch of businessmen for 20 pounds,” Neil told me. “I tried it that one time and it was so awful. It was the only job I ever walked out on. It was a bunch of big fat English guys in 12-piece suits shouting and yelling while we played cocktail jazz. I said, ‘Sorry, guys. I can’t do this.’”

And then: “Music isn’t for sale. It doesn’t have to be.”

From the age of 13, when he started taking drum lessons and played along each evening to the radio in his bedroom, to Rush’s epic farewell tour in 2015, Neil never lost this artistic integrity: “Music I played for love, never for money.”

In 2013, as we sat in his rehearsal studio in Oxnard, outside of Los Angeles, Neil talked about the drum lessons he had taken after Rush had sold millions of records and filled stadiums around the world. It was like discovering Wayne Gretzky had enrolled in stickhandling class after winning the Hart Trophy.

Neil’s nickname among musicians was The Professor. But he was always The Student. Even when he was routinely landing on Greatest Drummer of All Time lists, he never stopped learning. He studied with percussion legends, including Freddie Gruber and Peter Erskine, to recast techniques and be more improvisational.

It’s like he was 13 again.

He spent hours a day practising with just a high hat and metronome.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“That took me places,” he told me. “I thought I was working on a certain thing, but really what I was doing was gaining a whole new understanding of time.”

Over the years, as Rush cemented into a prog-rock powerhouse, Neil also gained a whole new understanding of life for those not in the spotlight.

“Between tours in the ’80s, I’d go on bicycle trips in Africa,” he told me. “That has to change you forever. Your biggest worry is finding water to drink and some rice to eat at the end of the day. It necessarily changes your values forever. I could never come home and listen to people complain about room service or catering again.”

When Neil first met band mates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson in 1974 — he drove his mother’s Pinto to the Rush audition in Pickering — he arrived with guarded expectations. The year in England had left him “disillusioned.”

But the three instantly gelled, musically and spiritually.

As Neil recalled before we had an In-N-Out Burger lunch: “I remember us all lying down on the floor among the gear in the rehearsal room talking about ‘Monty Python,’ talking about ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but especially it was the humour right away that we shared that made me really want to be in that band.

“That was the remarkable thing.”

As for the band’s new drummer, the remarkable thing is how that teenage conviction — music is for love, not money — never dimmed. His fascination with drumming, which started as a boy after he watched “The Gene Krupa Story,” took a brutal toll on his body. But he kept pounding away.

Ultimately, Neil Ellwood Peart was a New World Man of contradictions: a high-school dropout who became a philosopher king. A gentle soul who beat the daylights out of his elaborate kit with a ferocious playing style. A man with an easy laugh and a heavy heart. A global superstar allergic to fame. A history buff forever looking ahead. A loner by nature who united a generation of misfits and dreamers in subdivisions around the world with lyrics he’d jot down on a 5x7 pad after they flashed in his mind like lightning bolts.

The limelight or big money was never the goal.

“The one reason I like having anonymity is because I get to be the audience,” Neil once said, rubbing his chin. “Wherever I’m travelling, wherever I am on motorcycle or bicycle trips, I’m observing. The world is coming at me. I love observing and listening and imagining other people’s stories.”

His own story, which unfolded over just 67 years — life makes no sense — included chapters of improbable triumph and unimaginable tragedy, including the 1997 death of his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, in a car accident. Ten months later, Neil’s first wife, Jackie, succumbed to cancer. Neil was shattered.

But he got on his BMW motorcycle and stayed in motion for a year. And, somehow, he outran the darkness.

My heart always breaks thinking about that period in his life. And my heart breaks again now for Neil’s loved ones, including wife Carrie and young daughter Olivia. That afternoon in Yorkville, Neil was achingly tender while looking forward to Skyping with Olivia and showing her his hotel room.

“I’m just so used to being on the road,” he told me with a sigh. “But she’s too young to understand. I can stand missing her. But I can’t stand her missing me.”

Farewell to a king. This cruel fate was not self-authored.

You will be missed by so many, more than you could have ever known.