Finding Your Corner of the Sky – The Quarter-Life Crisis and the Life Less Ordinary
This is the second part of a series called the Wushfield Wednesday Write-Off, a friendly competition between my sister and I, where we’ll write on a different topic each Wednesday and share those writings with the world through the (admittedly meek) power of our blogs. This week, the topic was the quarter-life crisis, and her blog can be found here.
The title of this post is a reference to one of my favorite musicals, Pippin, an older work of Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz and made famous by the direction and choreography of the legendary Bob Fosse. The show has style and charisma to spare, and I’ve enjoyed it even more since I directed it back in the fall of 2003. Essentially, the plot revolves around a young man’s quest to live an extraordinary life, as he refuses to settle for anything less. He tries his hands at a number of lifestyles, such as being a great warrior or a great lover, but everything seems to fall far short of his expectations. Ultimately, he realizes that he may have to settle, but that doing so is not necessarily the disaster he imagined it to be. Still, “when you’re extraordinary, you have to do extraordinary things.”
The desire to be amazing and do amazing things throughout an incomparable life, accomplishing amazing tasks across an amazing world, is something that nearly every child experiences growing up. From the day we are born, many of us are told we are special, or that we are smart, or that we can be anything we want to be, as long as we set our minds to it. Of course, this is nonsense; no matter how much I focus, I’m never going to be able to fly without the aid of an airplane or helicopter, and I’m still waiting for my Green Lantern ring to come floating down from the planet Oa.
If the Green Lantern reference is lost on you, congratulations; you were likely somewhat popular in high school.
Perhaps we’re all special, but we’re not all special enough, it seems. While some may travel the world, exploring the plains of the Serengeti only before spiritual trips to India while on sabbatical from their high-paying jobs as French wine-tasters or German racecar drivers, most will probably spend the majority of their lives in a single town, living essentially average lives doing average jobs that need to be done, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The world turns on such people. When I was an English teacher, I like to think I made a difference in the daily lives of my students, giving them reason to think and question in between their inevitable bouts of teenage lunacy. I teach, while others drive buses or pick up garbage or deliver packages or manage the restaurants where I spend what little disposable income I have.
We can’t all be special, but we all wanted to be, and, in a sense, it’s a shame that so many people find themselves beaten down by adulthood and the inevitable responsibilities that come with it. I know a number of people who have tried to push away growing up with a strength not unlike that of Hercules, and all it has done is make them seem sad. Time is the one thing in the universe that is inescapable, other than a black hole and, likely, velociraptors. As the carpe’ diem poets so succinctly pointed out, time is our enemy, as it takes away our looks, our speed, our strength and, sometimes, our dreams.
All of that being said, it’s good to want. It’s healthy to want to escape from whatever town we’re in, as we find in ourselves the will to explore that pushed men and women to walk across the Bering Straight millenia ago. We should push ourselves to get uncomfortable before we settle into the endless days of work, paying bills, and sleeping. I’m 29 years old, and I’ve been to a few foreign countries, namely England, Australia, New Zealand and Jamaica, and I have on intention of going quietly into the night before I’ve set foot on every continent with the exception of Antarctica, as “ice” isn’t among my normally stated interests.
We should adventure, and even if our wildest dreams are unattainable, it doesn’t mean that we can’t leap into otherwise strange waters in the hopes of creating new dreams and finding new journeys, physical or otherwise. Thus, regardless of age, I urge you, dear reader, to work in a way that makes you happy, and to realize that life is only the trap you make of it. Some parts of reality are impossible to avoid, but it doesn’t mean that our dreams have to die, and it certainly doesn’t mean that everything needs to be accomplished by the time we turn 25. Health permitting, life is long, and the only adventure that we cannot explore is the one that we refuse to.
