Tuesday, November 01, 2005
GITTIN' OOOLD
The primary indicator that you’ve lost your youth is, obviously, acting old. But the tricky part is that you may be only 25 years of age, and still old.
Luckily, youth is an impetuous thing - and it sometimes will resurrect itself years after you've turned old. Thank goodness for resurrection for those still too young to be old. And what a beautiful experience it is for someone who just looks like they're not young anymore.
The culprit is taking yourself too seriously.
Getting up early for work, working hard all day, coming home and cooking, cleaning, and bathing many children can really contribute to being unable to be too spirited. If you keep your core beliefs though, there’s still a possibility for joy in your life. But when your job gets to be more important than your life, be careful, because your spirit is under siege.
Fortunately, people generally exhibit behaviors that are gentle reminders to help make them aware they’re heading in what can be an unhealthy direction.
A real good one is when your passions become annoying.
Example: You know you love to play music – you have a new song in your head that you want to figure out and record. But you’re in a pissy mood for the 4th time this week. “What’s on TV?” you feebly mumble to yourself. “Oh good, a rerun of the American Idol episode with all the goofy asses” which you just watched 3 days ago. After an Idol hour and 2 beers later, you remember you were gonna go to the gym too. “Fuck that, I’m tired of working out – it’s winter anyway - summer is eons away” And the TV rants on - rants on just loud enough to drown out the small voice calling to you to come out and play.
Believing in who you are is critically different than taking yourself seriously. Taking yourself seriously generally takes place after you’ve stopped believing/pursuing your passions.
When what you are isnt in touch with who you are, is when you begin to compensate by telling yourself that what you arent is more important than who you are.
Old age has struck. Joy will quickly dissipate now.
I realized when I used to hire a lot of people to work for me years ago, that the people most likely to stick around were the people who were willing to trade their identity for their security. But the price of their security was their person-ality. The biggest pains in the ass were the people with dreams - also the people I generally missed the most.
Joy is not secure and security is not joy. It has it’s own price. And it ain't cheap. Because, although the job you choose may be, as my Mom used to say, what you hate to do least, I believe that the joy you reap is commensurate with the courage that is required from yourself to accomplish whatever.
Call me scared, but I know at the end of the road it's only your courage that allows you to look back and say “Thank God I did that!”
Yeah, its too scary to think what sad sorta rationalization you'd have to feed yourself if you'd actually turned that little voice off.
