CSotD: Old Dreams Made New Again
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Between Friends is right at the head of the line among strips that sometimes get it so right that the humor sort of fades into the background and the response is "yeah."
Not "Yeah" and certainly not "Yeah!" but just … yeah.
Lovely timing, because not 24 hours ago, I unfollowed — not "unfriended," but close enough — a guy from Back in the Day, because he posted a "Now, kids, be practical" Facebook message about the elections that not only depressed me in general but dismayed me in specific terms of who he was when we knew each other.
Being practical is so overrated, and so particularly beneath him.
One of the big media lies is that the hippies — whoever they were — all sold out and became Wall Street types. Not to deny that there were some trendies in those days who would jump on whatever train was passing through, but I can only think of two people even near our circle who didn't follow through with their dreams.
There is often a necessarily pragmatic route to those dreams, but that's hardly the same as trading them in for the station wagon, picket fence and collie, and having to time-shift to Tralfamadore to escape the dreariness of the suitably appropriate life you've accepted.
Still, there's nothing inherently evil in picket fences or collies, nor does living up to your dreams require living in a tent, and not every straight job is a sell-out.
Aside from a large number of educators, the people I knew 40-some years ago include a physician or two, some social worker types, an EPA administrator and some other government infiltrators, as well as not a few who make their living by making music or by handcrafting music, or by producing music or by educating musicians or by running a venue in which music can be played.
Bill Walton once said, "If you don't believe your dreams will come true, it's time to get some new dreams," but maybe first you should go back and check out your old dreams.
Maybe they just need to be dusted off.
There are people who insist you shouldn't "dwell in the past," but if looking at your past makes you unhappy or limits you, that's an issue you should deal with, not ignore.
As Baby Blues points out, you can look back with a certain wry affection. I, too, was considerably studlier some years ago and not all that much even then, but I can chuckle over the extent to which it mattered and certainly over the extent it matters now.
I was talking to someone roughly my age the other day and we found that we're both about 40 or so in our dreams, a quarter century younger than in life, and at an interesting intersection of physical ease with a level of focus and experience we didn't quite possess yet, even then.
A big part of that is that you have to have done some damn stupid things in your youth if you want to acquire wisdom as you grow older, and there's a kind of mind game I may have suggested before but will suggest again:
Imagine that you die and get to the Hereafter with all its harps and wings and such, and St. Peter says, "Before you come in, you need to go back and relive a year in your life. You can choose any 12-month period, but you can't skip anything within that period."
My first thought would be to choose a time of tremendous joy and excitement and romance, but then, when I start trying to calculate the start and end dates that include the best of those moments, I find that they also include some soul-crushing low times.
So would the fun of re-living those exhilirating good times be worth the cost of going through those low points again?
And, putting aside the heavenly fantasy, would you be willing to have never had the high times if it meant you could also have skipped the bummers?
My answer is that life is a package deal, and that, if you like where you're at, you ought not to despise the road that brought you there.
And if you don't like where you're at, consult Bill Walton, above.
Turgenev in Suburbia
Presented for your consideration, that inveterate navel-gazer, Hilary Forth, who will one day either be the optimistic dreaming younger self who re-inspires her adult personna, or will never stop trying to document her place in the cosmos, and will become paralyzed like the young Russians whom Turgenev eviscerated in "On the Eve."
The climax of the novel is this bitter diatribe from a young artiste, after the female protagonist has eloped with a dynamic Bulgarian revolutionary:
We have no one yet, no men, look where you will. Everywhere—either small fry, nibblers, Hamlets on a small scale, self-absorbed, or darkness and subterranean chaos, or idle babblers and wooden sticks. Or else they are like this: they study themselves to the most shameful detail, and are forever feeling the pulse of every sensation and reporting to themselves: "That's what I feel, that's what I think." A useful, rational occupation! No, if we only had some sensible men among us, that girl, that delicate soul, would not have run away from us, would not have slipped off like a fish into the water! What's the meaning of it, Uvar Ivanovitch? When will our time come? When will men be born among us?
I think Pavel Yakovlitch needs to find some new dreams, but I'm trusting Hilary to one day be, not a detailer of every sensation, but that fish who slips off into deeper waters.
And I hope she sticks a pin into her old man on her way out the door, because that dude desperately needs to be jump-started.
Now here's your agenbite of inwit:
(This has song always reminded me of my friend and conscience, Charlie,
who never met a dream he wouldn't chase and couldn't grasp.)
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