August 29, 2006

• Dues

  You have to pay them to get where you want to go. Your destination strongly affects what your outlay will be, though an almost infinite variety of circumstances can (and usually do) conspire to send us hurtling down paths we might never have anticipated.  Dues come in many forms - financial, physical, emotional... In many walks of life, it's considered gauche to succeed without having paid them. We're supposed to start at the bottom and work our way up, battling all manner of adversity, in order to reach whatever pinnacle we're aiming for. Though each walk of life has its own unique demands, some dues are fairly universal. We're talking long hours, lousy conditions, unsympathetic or downright sadistic bosses, pitiful pay, and zero recognition. Hard work. Blood, sweat and tears.

  Most of us feel downright indignant when someone jumps the queue and achieves success overnight or without effort. I wish it could be bottled, because I could use a few drops of whatever it is that enables certain individuals to (seemingly, at least) hop straight on the non-stop express to where they want to go. The people who know at age 5 exactly what they want to be when they grow up, and then just... do that. Then there are the people we meet who stumble inadvertently into abrupt success in a field we've been working our butts off to break into for years.

  I'm having a hard enough time just figuring out what my desired future might be, and that's undoubtedly part of my problem. It's really not so easy to get to an unknown destination. I think that even though we often don't know exactly where we're going, we have a pretty defined idea of where we don't want to go. We know what's wrong, but have trouble focusing on what's right. For me, my failures have always stood glaringly out in buzzing neon lights, while my successes (and their possible ripple effects) tend to be more ambiguous, like photocopied flyers buried at the bottom of a drawer.

  Another problem is that I've paid a bunch of different kinds of dues. I've paid playing-in-shitty-bars-to-unappreciative-crowds dues, teaching-little-kids-in-another-country dues, heavy-physical-labour dues... If they were all dues of the same type, then perhaps I'd be further ahead. Perhaps we need some sort of dues collective or co-op, allowing individuals to pool their karmic resources. We could contribute the dues unrelated to our goals, and withdraw more relevent credibility.

  But then again, perhaps that kind of trade would turn out to be a trade-off. Though it frustrates me sometimes that my various efforts have yet to add up to something as substantial as I might like, there still aren't any of them that I would want to give up. I take great pride in being well-rounded, and I tend to operate on the idea that if I can just get rounded enough, I'll eventually start rolling. There have been many words, both positive and negative, used to describe this kind of existence: Jack of All Trades (and master of none), Renaissance Man, Polymath, Impractical Head-In-The-Clouds Dreamer Who Can't Just Bite The Bullet And Join The Real World...

  Oh well. Give me my irrelevent experience any day. There's more to life than the physical, measurable, practical yardstick against which we're told to measure our success. I think all our dues are only pretending to be unrelated. Underneath -- or perhaps far above -- it all, I think it all feeds into something far more important than that. We've got our eye on the wrong prize. Now the only trick is to figure out how to get where we're going without knowing where exactly that is...

  Take care
  -J-

  • 4:44 pm
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