Idle hands do the devil's work...or so the old saying goes. Meaning boredom or lack of direction can lead to trouble. Idleness. Aimlessness. The adjectives of youth, words you become all-to familiar with post college, post early 20’s. Epic odes have been written to growing older, existential crisis after existential crisis, what you're supposed to be feeling at what age, when is it appropriate to run out and buy that extremely ridiculous red sports car that you never wanted but society insists is going to make you feel better.
For me, aging, the passage of time is really what you make of it. Ignore the outside chatter and listen to your own inner voice. Maybe you relate to these words because you felt it when you were sixteen, or maybe you are forty and have yet to feel them at all, each of our narratives are different.
I was eighteen and fresh out of high school. Thinking that today was the day my life was finally going to start. Endless possibility was suddenly right in front of me. Terrifying, yet beautiful and even somehow tragic in a way. I went to college and nothing was really all that different. Institutional structure still existed even though it wasn't as strictly defined. Now I could cut class if I wanted to and hang out at Ikea. Instead of being reprimanded the only person I would be hurting was myself when I failed the upcoming exam. Responsibility was the greater punishment.
The proverbial “they” will always tell you that there is a way about life. You're born, to spend 12 grueling years in school, only to go on to another 4 or 5 years of college only to be spit out into the “real world” where suddenly you magically have a career and direction. Greater questions arose- how am I supposed to know who I want to be having just spent the last 16 yrs under the watchful gaze of an institution. How do you chose a major, define your identity when your perspective of the world was so minuscule, so provincial at the time? Why wasn’t there a “go find yourself” and come back period between high school and college? I'm all for a gap year of self-exploration. You come to appreciate education more when you have direction. Now I’m on a tangent. I digress, lets get back...
At 22 I was living in New York City the quote unquote “capital of everything possible” Life was exhilarating. I barely slept. I was in love with the city, its people, my friends. I loved by job, my apartment, my church... I was even in love with the concept of being in love itself. Life was grand, but it was also plagued by an inescapable melancholy. I had it all it seemed, life was on track, and yet there was something intangible missing. How would I attain it, if I didn’t know what it was...
Sofia Coppola's film Lost In Translation, almost perfectly captures that visceral angst of idleness and aimlessness. Here are two characters, so different in age and temperament yet bound by this similar longing for something nonpalpable...and just out of reach. Humans have need for horizons.
I guess, the point is to maybe embrace it. Maybe it's less of a cavern to be climbed out of and more of a wave that you have to ride. Until you find your horizon, until you spy land. “Someday the waves going to show me the way to the sand.” If life is a journey, and the journey is more worthwhile than the destination, wouldn’t it make sense to just turn off the GPS for a minute and get lost?
At one point I found myself 27 and in another existential spiral. I felt I was somehow behind my friends in terms of “classically defined growth” because my life had been less conventional. I was living, but in some ways I felt as though I'd spent years in a strange arrested development. Partially because Los Angeles has no seasons and thus passage of time becomes harder to track. My friends had this sense of security which I lacked because my eyes were still straining to pick out this horizon off in the distance that was so elusive to me at the time. A couple years later when their lives were falling apart and mine suddenly made sense, I didn’t feel so bad about my idleness and aimlessness, not to mention my life was so much richer filled with the narratives of the experiences I had encountered along the way.
Even to this day, I’m still struggling to find a new horizon, though much more content to value the simple but most important things- like family, and faith. As Andre Gide said “man can not discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself...
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