Lives

Everyone's afraid of their own life

If you could be anything you want

I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?

I had just feed the Leafy Sea Dragons and was standing in the aquarium on the public side watching to make sure they all ate and I got to talking to this guy. He was pretty young and on his way back from a two week trip to Catalina Island. He worked at an aquarium store in Northern California. The point of this was that as we were talking it became apparent that he viewed my job and my participation in it as living the dream. It made me feel weird, because though I love my job I don’t feel like I am living the dream. It occurred to me that a good portion of other people would look at this guy’s vacation and his boat he took it on as living the dream. I wonder if to some degree everyone spends much of there life staring at the horizon. The Counting Crows say “If you've never stared off into the distance then your life is a shame” and it’s true but what are we to make of the obsessive focus on the next thing that reduces what we have accomplished to an unsatisfying interim until the next thing. I wouldn’t say it’s a “the grass is greener” thing, it’s more of a pursuing the horizon. This job, that degree all are ends to other things and so are unfulfilling in themselves in the meantime. It’s like we focus so much on the horizon the present is lost. To this guy I am living the dream. I love my job but my mind is full of the next steps to make a job like this a more permanent reality. He sees me behind the tanks working and I see the eventual December. It seems that this excessive forward focus and marginalization of the present is fairly universal. Its either that or people squander their lives by focusing on the immediate pleasure and one day look up to realize that their life is ending with nothing worthwhile or lasting attempted.

It’s scary to think that we could be living the dream, that this reality in the present is what we have to work with. It’s scary trying to pursue your dreams. The more effort you make the greater chance of failure. Apathy and small comforts will ensure a fairly painless and trivial life. I spent so much of my life afraid, and I’ll level with you, I am scared now. I keep moving forward in small steps. I know another more capable person given the same materials and experiences could have fashioned them into something far greater. Maybe the greatest challenge is to enjoy how far we get without becoming prideful or comparing ourselves to some non-existent standard of performance.