INNER DRIVE
One of the things you can wonder about if you lie in bed in the morning waiting for something to catapault you out of bed with delight, especially when it doesn’t happen, is what inner drive might impels you along. Or is it only things that you are forced to do that gets you out of bed?
I look at Maggie, my son’s dog, who I take care of when they are out of town. Maggie is not aware of this problem of figuring out what gets her to act. She gets tremendously excited when I appear ready to take her for a walk. But the rest of the day she sleeps. Except for the presence of other dogs or the need to pee or poop nothing seems to impell her along. She eats when hungry and then goes back to sleep and never wonders a bit about it.
Ants or birds or even trees or groundhogs don’t seem to have a problem getting out of bed in the morning. Some inner drive impels them to fly or dig holes or sprout leaves. I am an animal just like them. What inner drive impels me along? When I lie in bed nothing seems to, I do what I have to do.
I don’t think Mozart had this problem. He had to make music. His head was full of instruments playing music, which he then had to write down. And he was rewarded well for doing so.
But I’m not Mozart. If I would get a great kick out of dreaming up songs and writing them down I might have a great time, the process might fill me with as much delight as making music did for Mozart. But even then while I was having a great time, no one would listen to my music or support me while I was doing it.
I guess for most of us we either find an occupation that makes us feel very alive or we do something that someone will pay us for even if we don’t get that much pleasure out of doing it.
But I guess the issue for me is that I am dropped here on earth and live here for three score years and ten and then I die, and what I would like to do is to spend the time I have doing something that makes me feel fully alive.
But one issue, of course is finding that thing that makes you rapturous. Often we are so busy doing what we have to do that we never discover what makes us feel fully alive. Or if we do find it is and are not willing to give it up for doing what we are doing for money or duty or expectation then we are miserable because we either can’t do what we want to do or we do insist on doing it and are broke or nearly so.
That is the problem. I guess that is what guidance counselors are for, to guide us, but I’m guessing that their advice will be to do what they think we should do to make money and not what we want to do.
Of course, I guess the greatest curse is never finding anything that makes you feel fully alive. But the curse that is almost as bad is to find something that fills you with life that you have no time for or people mock you for doing.
Fortunately, maybe, we are living at a time of artificial intelligence when robots will do all the blue collar work and other robots will do all the white collar work and humans will be free to do just what they want to do.
But what will that be? Perhaps most of us will just lie in bed all day waiting for something to catapault us with delight out of bed.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 