Trapped in amber
I was having a conversation today about growing older with one of my friends. They mentioned how rough it was and I was quick to argue that I didn’t feel old. The funny thing is, that is a oft lamented conversation I have with my wife, where I am the complaining of the steady inexorable advance of time. But she always takes the side that we are not old and that a large part of it is state of mind. She’s 100% right of course as she is in all things in perpetuity :) But seriously she is right, I don’t feel old most of the time, in my head I am still 18, or lets say 23 where no one would like me. Regardless I still feel like a kid most of the time. It’s the wear and tear on the machine my spirit is driving around in that gets me feeling the years. Decisions I made in the 90’s that I am living with now. But a better diet, good sleep, exercise, enough water and usually I am right as rain. Those resources can be tricky to manage but not impossible. So physically it has a pretty straight forward formula for maintenance, this flesh craft, organic mech, bioship….body I am in.
Mentally that is a whole different math. I find myself more and more realizing how damaging the electronic world has been to my command decks ability to pilot the ship. I say as I write a blog….
But it’s not just electronics, I think what is just as damaging is staying stuck in the things you have always liked and not allowing new concepts or ideas in. I am the first to revel in nostalgia, I still love alot of the stuff I did when I was 10 years old. But I find it imperative to force myself to adopt new things constantly, to learn new things, read different books, listen to new music, watch shows and movies that might be outside my bubble. There is a part of me that resists this, there is comfort in the familiar. I want to reread all my favorite books, I want to rewatch all my favorite shows. Those 15 songs from a 1995 mixtape, they are all I ever need….right? Wrong, I have to tell myself on a regular basis and I do it because when I learn something new, when I play a game I have not before, or read a new author or listen to a new band it wakes up the part of me that is still a kid. The only thing is, this habit of flitting to new things over and over again often means I have a wide but shallow pool of experience to pull from. But I don’t care. Really I do find new favorite things in the litany of new experiences. I would never have imagined I would enjoy going to concerts, or folk music, wool sweaters with elbow patches, Hawaiian shirts, pickled onions, yoga, books on philosophy or Buddhism, poetry.
So yeah I don’t like the idea of being in stasis, of staying the same as I always have been, so I change, I evolve, I adapter, learn, grown. I suppose that’s where the comic and website, the blog and the characters came from, an evolution of one thing into another into another.
Signing off from the command bridge of the sentient craft known as Guy, at least for today ;)
