Not too long ago I was driving to a show in Boulder with one of my very best friends. The hour or so drive was permanently punctured by our laughter and conversation, much like the wheel of an old music box, that turns to make a song as the little needles plunk away toward their destination. It was just as lovely, too.
We reached a point in our conversation where we were discussing a mutual friend, who she knows far better than I do. She talked about how happy it made her to see him happy, to see him doing what he loved to do, because she just didn't see him like that very often. I'd picked up over the weeks that this fellow had a hard time of it growing up, and as I always did upon hearing this information, simply added it to the catalogue of the person I was getting to know, so that I might make special note of it should it come up in conversation between us. These things, these growing up things- they really bring certain schools of people together.
At any rate, she related to me how he had been homeless at a young age at one point, and how that seemed to have affected his outlook toward life in ways she couldn't understand. I asked if she had ever had a friend who had spent time really being homeless before, and she said no. I told her about my friends who had done so, and how they always returned to the old life (meaning the daily, work and have a home life) a lot quieter, with far more to say and a kind of deep blockage that wouldn't let them say anything. It really changes someone, I said, sometimes forever.
We further dissected this friend of ours, trading information and impressions to try to understand together who he was and how he worked. What he needed from a friend, and what we might do to help him be a happy person someday. These things are very important to her and I. If we know you, and we decide that we love you, or that you are worthy of love, we will actively work on the problem of your not being happy. Many would say it's a maternal instinct, but personally, I always thought of it as a family instinct. As in, you don't choose your family. They choose you. And at the same time, you're family in not always who you're born into.
She mentions a conversation she had with our fellow the previous week, to illustrate her lack of understanding in regard to his outlook. She told me that he said he would be perfectly content, and in fact was considering, going to New York to live humbly, playing trumpet in the subways there for money. He could be perfectly happy doing this, he said.
This blew her mind. She wasn't offended or snotty— she was fascinated. "I don't think I've ever met anyone like him," she said. "I mean, I always thought The Goal was to make money and have a family; I always thought that's just what people do. And here he is, perfectly happy to do nothing but play for pennies for the rest of his life."
And this blew my mind. "You already know tons of people like this," I said, citing friends of ours that had traveled the trains, lived in collectives, busked on street corners and so on. She was still thrown. It was like she always knew this fact, really, but had never realized it. Had never held it up to her eyes, in her fingers, to see for herself what it really meant as a concept. And the crazy thing was, that I was doing the exact same thing with her original concept...
People just want to make money and have families?
It was like we were in the training room of the Matrix, where the simple knee jerk of an idea might throw your partner into the rafters, based on the programing of the system you were in. In her system, people grew up to go to school, went to school to go to college, went to college to make money, and made money so they could have a family. When I spell it out like this, it seems so simple. But it's not.
For me, I grew up to learn, I learned to survive, I survived to live, and I lived to... well... that changed every few years or so. But it was never to make money. And I've never wanted children. I've always wanted a lover, someone to marry. But that has nothing to do with money, or the cycle of life, or why we do things. That's just something everyone wants. I mean... you just do what you need to to live, and then you live however you want. If you're smart, you figure out what makes you happy. If you're not, then you continue to simply be a product of your life experiment, and too often, that's just miserable and messy. That's how I've lost a lot of old friends- whether to death or just to incurable unhappiness.
Two different view points. Two different outlooks. Two radically different ways of seeing and living in the world. And yet, here we are, two peas in a pod. And ever since that night a week ago, I keep asking myself, well, what do they want? You spend your whole life thinking it's not a matter of want, but a matter of need. That it's not a matter of desire, but of circumstance. After a while, you realize you have more control then you believed, but even after that... you may have noticed, most people never change.
Most people forget to ask themselves what they want.
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