Intangible Build: The Blueprint of a Happy Life

Wait wait wait, this is no coincidence.  I see you tripping off into the distance too often to not know the difference between your day to day life and the steps away from Longmont, Colorado.  

This anti-societal scream for independence that you live, it defines an era;

with your indifference toward pressures to conform that you’ve heard on the radio as you drive far from here, it’s like you never heard our teachers when they said to settle down.  The beaten path calls, as some say, and you’ve already left days before.

Today is the day to rewrite your un-invigorating aspects of life.  And that is the simple fact. A two step head start toward the next big thing is all it takes, or at least two steps away from the old.  

What is the intangible build, the model, the blueprint of a happy life?  My friend told me a secret the other day.  This friend is an early-thirties aged father, with a career and a car and a house.  He said, “we’re all faking it.  Everybody in the entire world is pretending we know what we’re doing with life.”

What a concept.  To have no idea of what you are doing in life. It’s fathomable, mostly because I have that thought several times a day. But to accept that it never goes away... There are a million ways to be lost in the world, but only a few ways to know where the hell you are.  

I have this insufferable urge to leave the place I am, and that explains it perfectly.

If I will feel lost and confused no matter where the hell I am, why don’t I go get as lost as possible for a while?  

That must be a great life skill, to seem less lost than you really are. If I’m only reasonably lost compared to an earlier point in life, is it easier to deal with?

Concepts.  I swear I deal in the currency of ideological shifts.  I’ll give you a little capitalist  inspired individualism, a little Ayn Rand per se, if you show me the light of relaxing in the sun and taking whimsical strolls through a thousand year old park.  What a concept. The daily grind that so many around us define as the only way, might be the wrong way, and we have no idea.  Of course it could be correct, because any choice you make is right.  You told me that a few weeks ago.  You said, “I can choose to leave here, or I can stay.  No matter what or why I choose, for whatever fears or hopes or worries, the future will be nothing like what I expect.”

That is a beautiful sunrise that I’m watching right now.  I can’t be wrong.  Whatever I’m afraid of happening probably won’t happen. Dreadful things that I can’t imagine will undoubtedly pop up, leaving me blown over like a dead wheat stalk, and I’ll have to deal with them no more than if I’d expected they would come!

Decisions

It is a nerve wracking experience, deciding.  When you commit, it is going to shape your life.  And it is easy to get caught up in those decisions.  Like the best way to get to work, or how to spend your Saturday night, or if you should stay late to talk to the sexy girl in your class.  No matter what you choose though, it is not going to end up like you think.  

The twist of the road in front of you seems concrete, but it is closer to cloud than anything.

It is a mirage of self fulfillment.  I define a choice as the best course of action, I commit full-heartedly, and in five seconds the outcome is different than I expected.  

So you can’t be wrong.  

I recently read On the Road by Jack Kerouac.  One main character, Dean Moriarty, is based off a true friend of Kerouac’s that grew up in Denver.  After years of running in giant cyclical paths across the continental United States, they are talking in New York City.  Dean says he is excited for the rest of his life.  

Someday, Dean says, we will be old men living on the streets, bumming around with nothing to tie them to society’s defined existence.

Not saying I want to be homeless.  But, to me, that is the perfect mindset in life.  Why would I accept the life outlines planned by a few generations of people I barely identify with?  If they’re all faking it anyways... why would I follow in confidence down a path that is not promised to be all I expect and has been laid by people in the same boat?  I can choose to be a hobo if it so pleases me.  Or I can chase a million dollar job and go bankrupt, just to be homeless anyways.

So you are moving to a foreign country,

and tomorrow is burning you like a hot iron sizzling the brand mark of conjecture.  

Rather that than the memories of home-state woes whispering the same sentence of failed self promises you held onto earlier in life.  And better to break an ankle while running than to have a heart attack relaxing in your lazy-boy.  I say bludgeon your dreams until they are intangible piles of colorful mush, all in an attempt to build something; don’t watch them glow and shine so gorgeous and new, never to be touched by your hands, just to rust and whither slowly into dirt that you can’t even say you once held.

I watched you shake your arms in the air to the open sky. You thanked a god you don’t believe in that you were leaving this place, and I smiled.  No tears to say I’ll miss you, or catching of my breath like I was sad, because I wasn’t sad. Every day I realize you are flying through the air toward the next nonexistent settlement where you will sleep for a while, with some vague concept that it is your ‘home’, and I am so astoundingly glad.  I think I told you to “leave already” a dozen times in the last few weeks.  

And now you’re gone.