Aspirations
Ave!
You begin your life hearing this hellish chant from athletes and pioneers, pyramid schemers and those successful mothers who ‘work from home’ and earn six-figure salaries. The world is already a whirring, uncaring confusion of colour and people before we have to be plucked from ignorance and introduced to this uncomfortable notion of consciousness. What could it possibly mean to leave our parents, those walking ever-providing towers of myraid powers, and think for ourselves?
Soon, you move into this red-brick and mortar building filled with other helpless souls much like yourself and taught the importance of money, about careers and pathways before the rest of it crumbles into cramming for those final year exams. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably only just making sense of it all: “Let nothing, nor nobody, stand in the way of your ambitions”.
The only clarity I can fathom is that I was born under a rock and hibernated for several years beyond that time, until my subterranean home became so heated and territorial that my lifelong plans were illuminated. Well, if you were born under a rock, I can assure you, you would likely be thinking as slanted as I.
Here’s the funny thing. We don’t know what dreams are, we don’t know how to save money or even acknowledge a world aside from our own until we are told so. But I would be drinking a bottle of extra dry gin before I believe we come to birth with nothing but a pharngx for screeching. I’m going to call it an inner seed for the sake of my sanity at this point, and consider that my life has made its most influential changes in these past few months. The best part is that they have no brakes and there’s only one direction.
My plan is simple but profoundly meaningful. You can identify an unhappy home when a feeling of dread takes you over after a long day. It should, ideally, be a santucary of artistic merit and a hothouse to intellectual sparring. When the New Year strikes, my new home will be the first time of my unveiling consciousness to demonstrate complete independence. Not many people my age boast about such a thing; indeed, many described as ‘helicopter kids’ are more content to stay with their parents. And my reasons are not purely out of spite or malice, but a truthful anknowledgement of meaningful progression. Simply put, when the mango from the branch is ripe enough, it falls to the ground and must grow it’s own roots.
Despite a mixture of apathy and overconcern thrown my way, I hope to at least illuminate one column. Choosing the contingency button on your life remote control is oftentimes a sign of uncertainty and insecurity.
There’s really one way to the Moon, and that’s full throttle.
If we launch into things half-heartedly, somehow expecting a safety net to catch us, then we aren’t really honest with ourselves or allowing ourselves to be open to the experience awaiting.
That’s why (risking the immaturity of sounding as a young father) if my children were to decide to move, I would inevitably find the holes in their armor but would let them make their own mistake (if such is the case). The only way to make a meaningful apprasial about something is to go all out, not just a dip of a toe in the water.
I guess all this illuminates another of those golden quotes about fear being the greatest limitation in our lives. Perhaps so, and we need to become steadfast warriors clad in our Mambo gear. But fear is just a flipside to confidence, after all. It makes sense for us to have both at any given time, but it makes even more sense for us to consider this: there is no experience quite like one which is wrought alone.
-Vale!
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