Dragons to Dungeons
There’s more than daughters in my equation. There’s a stepson. A lot to learn there to, in both directions.
It’s typically my job to drop him at school in the morning and usually I’m so preoccupied with what’s coming that I barely do more than make sure he’s safe then I’m off with my day, my mind hours ahead and weighed down by the countless things that haven’t even occurred yet. This morning I was fortunate enough to be held up and watch as he made his way into school. It was a roundabout trip, much like his walks home that I’ve observed. He stops to pick up a stick, stares at the sky for some reason, and takes in anything in everything all at once, but nothing too long and nothing too intensely. It’s like the warming spring breezes of Chicago are wafting him into school and he’s in no mind to fight them. He’ll get there.
Instinctively, I can feel myself tense and frown and think ‘focus’, so I can move on. I’m programmed at this stage of life that our days are a series of accomplishments. Either checkboxes filled or left open for the morning stress update files. I need my coffee and the email inbox awaits and there are appointments and calls and a list of things to be done.
The crap we teach our kids.
Pure. Unadulterated. Grade ‘A’. Crap.
He’s got it right and I’ve got it wrong. We as a society have it wrong. The fallacy of sunken costs has many of us boarding this train of suicidal stress every day. Going to places we don’t want to be, doing things we don’t want to do, in order to acquire things we don’t really need, to live a life we didn’t really plan, and die with a box piled high with wishes, wants and should haves.
Years of toil and labor and work for the sake of…………what? If you’re living your dream and doing what you most love, then good on you. I suspect most of us aren’t. Most of us are earning a living (HA!) and trying to get through to the next level, which is just a continuation of the same, only more stressful.
We teach our children they have to excel, to be the best, at something external to them, instead of teaching them to be the best THEM. Be the best YOU that you can be, and who gives a tinkers damn whether you’re an astrophysicist or astronaut. Life certainly won’t. Nor will history for the vast majority of us.
And the order with which we establish victory, with which we keep measure, is the nonstop accumulation of money and the consumption of crap. I love stuff as much as the next guy, I do, but the older I get the more I realize it just isn’t what I wanted, it certainly isn’t what I needed and most often it’s not even what I thought it was.
And yes, unfortunately, we need to make money. Because, again, we’ve built a world in which we are slaves to our own ambition and now are beholden to the very thing we created. We were better in our hunter-gatherer days. They were far more affluent than us. Not because they wanted much, but for wanting so little to be satisfied.
Proof of this can be found at any Christmas/Birthday/Gift Exchange with a small child. Invariably, you’ll stress and suffer and strain in order to get them the latest toys, the latest gadgets. And invariably, they’ll have more fun with the box it came in.
I’d give anything to meander down those sidewalks again, slaying dragons with sticks, to find myself blown happily along by that same Chicago breeze that he sails through instead of the tempests that swallow up many of my days. I’d trade everything I’ve bought through the years to be that boy again, tramping through the woods with my .22 rifle and a pocket knife, the tales of Mark Twain and Natty Bumppo still swimming through my as of yet unwarped mind. To be slaying mythological dragons once more instead of the all too real ones I now battle daily. To once more being atop that makeshift castle wall of pillows and sheets rather than in the dungeon in which I’m now trapped.
As I say often, our children have as much to teach us, if not more, than we do them. Rather, they have much to remind us of, if we listen. Unfortunately many of us, me included, are so busy pretending we’ve got it figured out to listen.
I’ve amassed so much, and accomplished so many things. Yet, as I sat there watching him twist and turn his way into school amidst a hundred whims and without reason at all, kicking at grass and turning this way and that to check out every item that caught his attention, I realized a simple truth.
He’s far wealthier than I am.
