As I stated in Digging Up Bones: Part One, I have reconnected with some of my childhood/teenage friends. Some have become very successful, a talented singer/actress, a podcast producing California beatnik, lawyers, doctors, and State senators, just to name a few. These fortuitous individuals, at the time, seemed no different than me. Since hindsight is 20/20, I now realize they were much different. Somehow, someway, they were consciously focused on or led blindly to their destiny. They intuitively understood Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues idea that "the greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources". Looking back, I never remember seeing any opportunities, although, most assuredly they existed.
Upon pondering my compatriot's achievements, these Pink Floyd lyrics permeate my musings:“You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun". My starting gun must have had a silencer, because I never heard it, or maybe I just wasn't listening. I remember, as a youth, feeling that I had time to accomplish anything. Time was irrelevant and never ending. It seems like just yesterday that my 15 year old body was atop a Honda Twinstar 250 motorcycle careening along I-40 towards Little Rock: destination, McCain Mall, a veritable plethora of perceived feminine interaction and opportunity. I was barely old enough to legally drive a motorcycle and immensely sure I was not old enough too care. I danced with the devil, laughed with the sinners and with hedonistic zest, roamed the unpredictable world of young adulthood. My journey through Wonderland would have made Jack Kerouac blush and Robert Frost step quickly to the embankment of the "road less traveled", or so I thought. How the inflated perception of yourself allows for a narcissistic impression of your conquests, when we are all really a speck in the universe and a wink in time.
Somewhere along the way, father time caught me sneaking out my bedroom window and grounded me to old age. With one leg planted in my proverbial room, balancing my escape from childhood with one leg and the other leg dangling out the window grasping for adulthood, all the while teetering over the window ledge as not to damage my manhood, I turned and exclaimed, "I was just going out for a while and I'll be back soon"! His resolve undeterred, I was forever stripped of my privilege of youth.
Don't take this blog as an admission of failure or an essay to produce pity. My guardian angel has been working overtime and I have been blessed with more riches than one microscopic man deserves. This was merely a divergence into retrospection.
Bob Seger said it perfectly, " I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then".
When I heard the starting gun, I didn't know what which way to run. I would not wish to lose the wisdom that I have learned from my mistakes, it was hard won. Most of us won't make it into the history books but if we can find a way into the hearts of the people we have met along this journey and maybe made their loads a bit lighter then I think we have lived well.
ReplyDeleteDamn, Jackson! Where did you get all that school-larnin'?
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