Perpetual Frown

On occasion, I hear about someone I know deciding to ditch the usual careers that most people would kill to have, and go off to do something entirely unlikely to be lucrative or stable. Everybody knows someone like that. The chap who works and scrapes his way through university, then decides to forget about being an architect, and mortgages himself to the hilt to move to Aspen and become a ski instructor. These are the people whom your parents fear you will become. An utter lack of stability and earning power. Responsibility is the big word that is thrown at you, and it usually sticks, weighing on your shoulders as you carelessly mix metaphors in a blog post written on a weeknight after yet another grinding day of responsible work. Then with some people, it doesn't stick. It slides right off, and these are the people who become chefs and sculptors and apple growers.

The vast majority of the time, I truly admire these people. They are the ones who have been able to reject society's idea of what they are, and strike out to become their own idea of what they are. We are expected to be solid, productive members of society who will make the sole focus of our lives stable financial foundations for our assumed families. To that end, we struggle to find jobs that pay as well as we qualify for, with hours reasonable enough in the long term to get married and raise children, live in the suburbs where kids can run and play. Those few that are able to reject that, do manage to wring admiration from my dry heart.

I was going to rant on about the difference between idealism and laziness, but I find that I have not the spirit to rant. Instead, here is a thought.

My life has become dry. Life should be wet. So lush that you cannot but lust to grab at it, but too slippery to get a solid grip of. A mind is reflective of life. A mind should be overflowing with thoughts, spilling over the edge, inducing you to grab at them and throw them back into the mix, but the whole pile rises to an intimidating height, then falls away, as a school of fish scatters and disperses, only to reform in some other corner of the mind. That is what it is like to have a mind awash in itself. And now I am coming to know what it is to have a mind wrung out by weariness and a perpetual frown.