Of Dragons and Fireballs
So I’m back from home. It seems fitting in a way that I left 2011 one way and 2012 begins and it’s feels different. Going back east always enables me to reconnect to a former self that I often forget exists. Years of moving places, meeting new people and so forth leave me constantly reinventing myself. While this offers me new opportunities, it leaves me wondering what I’ve left behind.
More than anything, going home always makes me remember who I’ve become and more comfortable in that. My uncle always reminds me when I see him, “when you were a kid, you always said you were gonna move far far away and you did.” Then he laughs. I think back to that loquacious little guy and I wonder what we have in common now.
Our hopes and our dreams. He saw the globe and believed the world was smaller than it was at a time when it really wasn’t. Now it is, but I look around and wonder where I fit into this whole mess of things.
Driving back I thought about video games. I don’t really play them. But life can sometimes be like them. If you think back to the original Super Mario Brothers, there are levels and each has a boss at the end. You beat the boss and advance to the next level. At the end, there’s a big boss and you win if you beat said creature. Older games didn’t allow you to waste time deviating on your own little tasks. I watch my brother or friends play current games and it’s possible to be part of the ecosystem while specializing in a particular kind of gameplay. (Guys who only sniper in Call of Duty)
In real life, there’s the path you’re on and where you’re headed. Then there’s all of these extraneous things on the outskirts. I told my dad that when I was younger, I saw possibilities and opportunities and always wanted to take them. Not because all of them were necessarily fit for me; but simply because I didn’t want to miss out on anything. When you traffic in the mysteries of what’s possible, you want an escape hatch or a scratch-off ticket that gives you what you want faster than just hunkering down.
When you’re younger, life seems full of mystery. When you get older, it feels very different. People still impose their will, they still communicate their expectations and want you to ascribe to the absolutes that govern how they live their lives. I’ve always been estranged from these ideas because they simply defy how I see the world and live my life. But I’ve been fighting upstream for years trying to get where I want to do in the face of all of it.
Right now, it’s about building a foundation from which the other stuff can live on. It was interesting when someone said as much without me having to express it. “You’ve got these goals and you’re working towards them. You’re building the future you want for yourself and I’ve got nothing but respect for you for that.”
I try to be ethically consistent. I don’t necessarily know my ultimate destination, but I know what I don’t want now in a way that I never used to and have become a lot better at avoiding it.
So another year of chasing down dragons and dodging fireballs.
All Growed Up
I’ve found that I judge people based on my perception of their awareness of the world around them. I don’t know if I always have, but I’ve noticed that I tend to assume people come equipped with a certain base of knowledge or skills from the start. Then we talk and I adjust my expectations or ideas or even what I’ll reveal about myself based on my perception of their assumptions about me. I probably spend entirely too much time on all of this mental judo, but it doesn’t really take me that long in the grand scheme of things because I’ve been doing it so long.
I was thinking recently that hearing my favorite music, made me feel like I was old for the first time. I’d never really been confronted by the feeling that I’d truly passed a milestone in my life. Maybe it’s the choice of friends I’ve had over the year or just the lack of relative interaction I’ve had with young people until this past year; but I always felt relevant and now I’m not so sure.
On the flip side, for years I always felt like some sort of pseudo-adult. Like, my age indicated that’s where I was in my life and my accomplishments weren’t things I could do as a kid, so clearly I must be a grown up.
But the more I think about it, it wasn’t until this summer that things started to happen that made me feel like I’d really arrived at a place that made sense to me. I don’t really know how to articulate this without covering the background which is probably a book within itself; but the long and short of it boils down to recognizing that I’ve had experiences which are worth sharing. I tend to downplay my experiences a lot because I’ve tended to look at what other people do or have and wonder what I’m not doing right.
I think that’s a pretty human thing, so I don’t feel alone there. But if the last year taught me anything it was learning that the things I used to think were important don’t matter nearly as much as I used to.
More than anything else, I’ve come to the conclusion for now that storycraft is the only thing that matters. People just want to hear what they want to hear and they don’t always care about the details. The few who do are usually worth keeping around.
