Part 14

By a meandering stream

Christopher Walken, a contemporary actor who always played tough guys, but also slightly unbalanced tough guys in movies, was asked once where he got that persona from, and he replied that when he was young an uncle of his walked up to him and said "You're a tough guy, aren't' you?" and that ever since then he thought that maybe he was.

One day, when I was young, there was a song playing by simon and garfunkle called "Continue to Continue" and my mom looks over at me and says "This song sounds like you" and whatever she meant by that, or not, that comment always stayed with me.   

She also hung a poem above my bed from Henry David Thoreau:

If a man does not keep pace with his companions,

perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Let him step to the music which he hears,

however measured or far away.

Whether these two things defined me or not, or whether I was already this way and my mother's was just commenting on characteristics that she saw in me, it is all hard to untangle, but over the years I have come to realize that my personality is such that I have always sort of just continued to continue.   I have always just moved within the currents that are presented to me in my life.  I have rarely veered away from them.

It is not that I do not work hard at anything, but that I end up working hard on things that show up and that I am interested in.    It is as if I have spent my life sitting by a lazy stream, and occasionally something floats by that I take an interest in.    I have rarely gone after things that have not been presented to me first.

For instance, I am on a bike trip, and meet a couple of girls and run out of money at the bars with them.    There happens to be an oil crew in town so I spend a couple of years working on oil crews.  Or.  Laker airways has $129 dollar tickets to London so I fly over there and proceed to spend about seven years there working in pubs and night clubs as a bartender.    Or I move back to Boston and spend my nights reading at the Boston Public Library and I meet Michelle one night and end up marrying her and raising a family with her for the next 30 years or so.   Or, someone one day gives me a computer and there is a language on it, so I figure it out and end up spending 25 years as a computer consultant.   Things and life changes have always just appeared in my life.   I let them drift by, or I pull the odd one out of the stream and spend time with it.

I used to tell people during my technology career that I have never worked a day in my life.   I just found something that I was good at and happened to enjoy, so it was always easy.

So, turn the prism and from one angle you can see someone who never worked all that hard at anything, or from another perspective you can see someone who always waited for something to appear, and then went after it.   From one perspective a wasted life.   From another a zen life.   We are way past judgement.  It is what it is.

The interesting thing here is that my Dad, who was very nearly a high school and college drop out, but then became a successful airline pilot, always said that he did not want any of his kids to get into flying because he himself had been so lucky to get there. 

The truth of it is though, his Luck was that he just happened to find something he was really good at.

I feel like my life has been very similar.    A small handful of things have appeared in my life at opportune moments and I have gone after them when they easily fit within my life.    I never really worked all that hard at any of it, because the things I chose always seemed to fit.

I have no explanation for any of this.    Only a fleeting and innocuous observation.