an actual topic for once!

i'm interested today in FREEDOM and our notion of it. i think there is a mass .."problem".. for lack of a better word at the moment for all the Gen Xers that i know concerning freedom / options / our sense of reality and fulfillment. we are, many of us, not feeling fulfilled. and i've been giving this a lot of thought lately, cuz i suffer this (truly luxury problem - i acknowledge completely that this aint a real problem in the grand scheme of things) with the best of them.

i have always valued having OPTIONS. hell, it's the american way. "anything is possible," "make your dreams a reality" in the "land of golden opportunity" and all that. i recently read a quote that went something along the lines of "nothing is less motivating / helps you focus less than hearing 'you can do/be anything you want to'." this is counterintuitively true, i think. the notion of having every possibility is something we were reared on, something we learned to keep close to our collective chest. as long as we had options, we were golden. options made everything possible, gave our life a sense of hopefulness and a bright future.

as such, we, as a generation, have tended to KEEP keeping those options open—maybe well past the point when we were supposed to. like, at 18, this is an understandable lesson, and something you want to impress upon a young lad or lass about to break out of the house and start living as an adult. though when i think about it,  it seems the world has changed quite a bit since the 80s when i was a soon-to-be-adult. kids today have a much greater sense of the world much earlier, such that nowadays, leaving home for college is no longer the first "big view" into the real world; it's actually the point in time when you can fully start living and inhabiting all the ideas that were maybe just experiments at home or in high school. whereas in my high school, you could divide the student population into more or less 3 or 4 groups (academics, jocks, stoners a.k.a "metalers" as my social studies teacher liked to call the kids in black AC/DC teeshirts and long hair),  high schools today are more or less representative of the adult population in the real world. you've got every race/mix, nationality, gender, sexuality, diet, political leaning, artform, athlete and jr. engineer represented. our parents' idea of high school is a quaint and outdated notion born of the 50s, where we are fleshy fresh tabula rossa just taking in information and learning what's-out-there until well into our 20s.  today's teenagers know what they are into. many of them know what they will do as adults. there are activists and transsexuals, accomplished designers (tavi) and burgeoning scientists (eva vertes). kids today are free. they learned and saw — and they are experimenting and experiencing well before 18. they got a jump on the whole adult thing.

but back to my generation (sorry, i know, the change is abrupt and not altogether inspiring!). now in our 40s, we find ourselves sort of quizzically looking at our job, our apartment, maybe even our kid or family — and feeling, well, "is this it?" yes, there are moments of contentment, maybe even joy, but from conversations i've had, i sense a lingering idea of the-future's-so-bright — even among my starting-to-grey, starting-to-wrinkle generation. once you hit 40 (which i just did), you realize, as my friend put it "we are no longer the generation where anyone's hopes lie." but oddly, we've carried this hopefulness with us, and we're loathe to relinquish it. because who are we without all these possible, improbable futures laid out before us. we are defined by our ideas of what could be, of possibility.

i've long used the metaphor of having a "whole pie" of opportunity, each piece representing a different avenue, career or lifestyle choice. the catch 22 lies in the fact that if i choose one piece of the pie wholeheartedly, the rest of the pie goes away. ("just one piece!?") so rather than choose a piece, i have sort of dabbled, sniffed, maybe licked the crust here and there, but i leave the whole pie-of-opportunity intact, so that i might revisit all the options at a future date, and re-sniff, re-lick, what have you.

you can see where this is going.

the idea that freedom lies merely in having options is an outdated one. options are the FIRST step in freedom, yes. but the next and most vital step in actually experiencing the freedom of, as i define it, living your life expressed as only you uniquely can express it, is in CHOOSING one of these directions — and moving on it, with commitment. i speak from experience. here's what i've gotten out of keeping my options open: 1) a sense of enormous endless possibility in the (abstracted) future, and 2) a feeling of actual disconnectedness in the actual, realtime world. yes i've had experiences that are enriching; yes i've experienced joy and fun and good times, etc — but the larger experience leaves me feeling untouched, leaves the things i truly care about and am passionate about (for me it's animal welfare, philosophizing, helping others and maybe writing?) sort of unexplored, unaddressed. we are, i believe, largely a mix of reactions to the world around us. the way our chemicals, histories, neurons, observations and intellect combine is truly unique to us, and, as trite as it sounds, no one will experience things just as we do. to express our experience clearly seems to me as true and real and valid a use of our time as anything else — and probably the most interesting and useful.

i like to think of humanity as a giant organism, and we're each cells with our own tasks and assignments. if we don't do our job, it allows the other cells to have greater prominence, which aint balanced, aint healthy. for the system to operate smoothly, cells do their unique cellular thing clearly, and perhaps they gang up with other cells to create an organ with a greater function than any individual cell can accomplish on its own. but the key is that the cell does what the cell most naturally wants to do. one thing leads to another.

i'm not even high or drunk. if you made it this far, you are my friend!