Entries in Life

I suspect that by the time they reach 35, most people have given up on whatever they thought life was supposed to be when they were 16, 17, or 18 and resigned themselves to the mundane and everyday.

About a decade ago I caught up with some friends from high school, and one of them commented that we'd all become pretty much what we said we were going to be. I remember him saying it with a little surprise and some resignation.

In some ways those dreams are two decades gone for me, on the other hand it's all worked out pretty much like I thought it would. Yeah, I've had some setbacks, maybe it's a little slower, and I'm a little more pragmatic now, less idealistic, but I'm actually continually shocked at how my life seems to guide me back on to the rails I chose in my teens.

Maybe I should have dreamed bigger? I might have, but I grew up in a culture that encouraged that savoring of the small bits of community, and have spent much of my life trying to dream bigger, trying to escape those confines. I never really wanted to change the world, only my world; maybe that the world of my elementary school didn't extend too far beyond the mile or two in each direction that containd the associated farm and community, and we lived another 16 or 17 beyond that gave me a sense of my world that didn't go very far.

However, that sense of being outside looking in also let me get the same realizations about the world at large fairly early: As you say, there will always be poor people. There have nearly always been happy people and sad people. We won't create a utopia on a larger scale, if it were possible someone else would have done it, so the best we can do is to foster those around us, and be willing to cooperate with the larger world when that presents itself, or defend ourselves from it when it encroaches.

As to the initial question, yeah, there are dull people, but if we're open to relate to the larger world as we do to our immediate one there's quite a bit to find fascinating and intriguing in the life of a random person. We just have to value them in the same ways we value those closest to us.