Today was dedicated to tying up loose ends and implementing my New Year’s resolutions. I wrote letters and emails to what feels like everyone in the world this morning in keeping with my new policy of trying to keep in touch. If they don’t respond…well, it’s out of my hands and that much less to feel guilty about on my part. I have a real problem with feeling guilty. I always feel I should be doing something more constructive and worthy with my time, but I’m often too lazy to get around to the chores I know must be done. Like writing letters, especially. There are so many people I would like to write a letter to that I just get overwhelmed and never pick up my pen and feel bad about it for months, when all it would take is fifteen minutes of writing a day for a week. Guess it all goes back to my masochistic tendencies…My friend Joel once mentioned that his secret to getting everything done lay in the fact that he always did what he felt was most important at the time. If it lead to some things being unfinished…well, they were the least important anyway. My problem is that I leave the important things for last because they’re usually not as much fun. My dream, actually, is a lifestyle in which I didn’t have to DO so much, but I don’t think it’s possible for me. I am too meticulous and task-oriented to be the free spirit I dream of becoming. But that’s okay, because I don’t think I’d truly be happy that way. I need a to-do list to check off. I just need to make sure it’s realistic and leaves me enough time to relax. And luckily, here in the slow-moving countryside, I usually have time to do just that. I hope I will remember how to relax when I hit the real world again…I would hate to lose my new-found tranquility!
I started another Jack Kerouac book today—The Dharma Bums. It’s pretty good and some parts of it really resonate with me. Some of it strikes me as too new-agey—in particular, I hate how people have latched onto Buddhism as being the spiritual answer to everything and the characters in the book seem to do just that. However, I do like a lot of their other approaches to living. One of the main characters, Japhy, lives in essentially a hut with no real furniture and reads all the time, when not taking off to the mountains for weeks at a time. Living by my wits in the wilderness is kind of a dream of mine but I haven’t yet mustered the courage to attempt it. Going to the cabin when I get back to the U.S. is my first step, and then we’ll see…The protagonist’s disgust with consumption-driven society (evidently a concern even in the 1950s!) voices what I have felt but have been unable to articulate quite as well. He calls for a return to a simpler way of living based in wonder at the natural world:
“…colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization” (p. 39).
I guess it’s easy for me to knock the middle-class lifestyle at my age, with virtually no responsibility and the world at my fingertips, but I hope I’ll manage to retain my ideals and dreams no matter my age, for I don’t think this is an immature or unrealistic vision that I will gradually grow out of. Unconventional, yes, but what is convention but just proceeding mindlessly down the same path so many others have trod? That is my greatest fear—that I will sell out for a TV and comfort and become one of the mindless millions. I guess that’s why I was surprised so many of my college friends, no matter their liberal ideas at Pomona, are knocking themselves over trying to find prestigious consulting jobs. I know I shouldn’t feel so critical, but I just don’t think that’s the way I want to or even should live. I want to wander the world, climb every mountain, as it were, and take in adventures and experiences like a desert wanderer takes in water—because it’s vital and necessary. I’m not so concerned about money…in fact, in some ways I wish I didn’t have much because I think the possession of money holds me back from taking risks and, I fear, rather unexpectedly makes me less generous. The more you have, the more you can lose, and therefore I think having less would actually make me happier and less worried about material things. I once had illusions of changing the world, but right now I am more concerned with personal revolution. How can I possibly ask the world to change if I remain the same? And perhaps in the process I will find more answers for my questions on how to live better—more harmoniously, more sustainably, more thoughtfully—and how to reclaim my sense of wonder. That’s what I see as my life’s mission now and I am eager to take it on. It’s time.