[muse] Wasted on the Young

[jrising]

There was such a bad reaction to Jim that I'm going to go with James instead. I won't stop anyone from using Jimmy, but I'm going to change what I call myself. There are endless silly pros and cons and more exciting options, but hey, it's just a name.

I've been thinking about youth.

I'm in awe of a friend of mine. She has a husband, a career, a house, a dog; she's had a history of excellence in Rocky and been a leader of the community since before I joined. She approaches life as a vibrant adult, grounded but still growing. So I've always looked to her as a role model. And she's a year younger than me.

Some part of me still conceives of myself as a student, a youth, a troublemaker without a cause and without the wherewithal to be a true rebel. When I teach or organize or lead, it's with a tongue in cheek chic of a boy among boys. I have the experience and understanding to do more. And the capacity to take the endless responsibility and the responsibility to do it to my full capacity.

But there's plenty of time to be old. I never want to stop adventuring with life. I love my younger friends as peers, and I think rightly so: I'm always being impressed by their initiative, maturity, and experience. I don't want to give up my million playtime projects or get a job with a title that pretends to define me. I don't want to settle, or even settle in.

The brochure for life doesn't advertise any good packages for this. I want the best of both youth and adulthood. I'm supposed to be getting a pet (if not a child), a car (if not a house), start drinking beer regularly, stop getting too excited. But I don't want to be a tree: I'm a pond plant, growing deep roots while still living in a totally fluid world.

And it's not just me. The brochure we got was out of date when we were born. We need a new paradigm. A phase in life that acknowledges how changeable things are in the era of the internet, where people discover new interests, communities, careers, selves every five years.

I'm writing up a description of who I am when I'm at my best, in my zone, getting the most out of the incredible life I've already built and discovered around me. I want that to be James. Maybe it's time to re-read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.

Thoughts? Is it a bore to read my inner musings? I know others are in similar situations: has anyone else found such a paradigm?

Comments

[siderea]

http://xkcd.com/c150.html

I know others are in similar situations: has anyone else found such a paradigm?

I dunno: have I?

I sorta feel I'm in the opposite situation: I've always looked forward to adulthood avidly, and now that I'm here I love it. To me, it's always meant autonomy and liberty and getting to spend adult quantities of money on toys and playing dress-up. :D Still no mortgage, no car, no kids, no spouse, no college degree (at least for a while yet), finally settled down with a real job after 10 years and absolutely no sense of conflict between this lifestyle and being an Adult. I note it freaks out some of my peers, but apparently that enjoying-shock-value thing wasn't just an adolescent phase for me.

But perhaps I'm more one of those dreaded responsible grownup types? I am both working and in school full time. I'm pursuing an honest-to-gosh career. I've given up most of my free time to do so. I carry all sorts of responsibilities. I kinda keen on having responsibilities. I'm just like that. I've given up my music mostly, the SCA mostly, all sorts of other random spontaneous fun mostly. My life is lived, to a remarkable degree, on a schedule.

So I don't know. To what extent is this about flexibility and changeability to you, and to what extent is this about not just conforming? To what extent is this about responsibility, and to what extent is it about vitality?

One of the paradigms which informs my adulthood is this, though I do not agree with all of it:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Nothing there about not adventuring, or about settling down to a nice little ball-and-chain of consumer-homeowner debt, or one's duty to propagate the species, or conforming for conforming's sake, or about assuming responsibilities for respectibility's sake. It's an older idea of maturity, which says it's more a matter of how you conduct your self, than how you conduct your life.

[jrising.livejournal.com]

First, I love your icon, that poem, and your last line.

I have no aversion to responsibility, and I strongly believe that there's no conflict between play and responsibility, between maturity and flexibility, between experience and learning. I'd want to approach adulthood the way you described... and I think I almost do.

To answer your questions, this isn't motivated by a fear of conforming, because there's very little chance that will happen. It isn't adulthood I'm concerned about-- I'm sure I'd dislike "conventional" adulthood, but I've never worried that I would become that. What concerns me is the persistence of aspects of a childhood psyche weighing down and watering down my appreciation of adulthood. The advantage of conventional adulthood is that it's well-defined: there's a point at which the child self can be definitively repressed and the adult self created out of totally disconnected terms. I am at no such liberty. On one level, I'm living that life of childlike freedom and adultlike experience... and yet I worry that pieces of my self-conception allow for only a shadow of what I'd like to be.