Heart and Mind

Injustices of Resources and Timing

I have often heard people lament that there is a cruel injustice to aging and retirement. The rather valid argument is that we spend our whole able-bodied, youthful lives working hard and wishing we had the free time and luxury that a non-working retire-ree has; but when we get to the age of retirement, we can't fully enjoy it as much as we hoped because we're not usually as able-bodied or healthful as we used to be.

It makes sense to me, and there's something more than just a little disheartening about it. This kind of thing is also not limited to this one example. I recognize stuff all the time that has a similar, almost cruel irony to the timing in which it unfolds. Here are two examples I have noticed in my own life.


Musical Resources

When I was sixteen, I started playing in bands.

In those early days, we all got by and managed to musically prosper quite well on an exuberant dose of youthfulness, uncompromising passion, and spiritual devotion to the cause and the groups we were in.

I know this to be true, because we lived some of the most honest, memorable, and wonderful times in our musical lives, despite the fact that we were working with very little, financially-speaking. In the early days, the equipment wasn't always pro-grade; but we managed to put something wonderful together with a low-budget, piece-meal sound-system. Means to record ourselves in a home-demo setting were so modest that often hitting play & record on a cassette boom-box was as good as we could get. Bands and vocalists rarely owned a PA system, and how many backing-vocalists you had was often limited by the number of microphones or stands you had.

Somehow, though, we made it all work because we were hungry, determined, and committed to the cause.

Sometime around my mid-twenties, things got easier, resource-wise. We now were working adults. We had the money to get the equipment we wanted and needed. We would never have to hang microphones from the ceiling because we couldn't afford mic stands. Bands I've been in in recent years have enjoyed "luxuries" that the bands of my formative years could never have imagined. Recording equipment, multiple instruments per individual to best suit the song, mixing boards, and so much more. And we were better writers, performers, and all-around musicians.

Still, there was a tradeoff. Right around the time when better equipment and better financial backing entered the picture, we also saw arguably the demise of the golden age of our musical careers. After all, the means that brought the income—full-time working as full-time adults—also killed some of the vibe.

I've never entirely given up writing and playing and I have no plans to, and my most recent full-fledged band was just a year or two ago, but things have slowed down compared to the old days. Bands are best suited for youthful people. We lived for our bands back in the day. We had no full-time careers, no families of our own, no kids, no mortgages. There was a brotherhood among our bandmates and we lived and breathed music. We'd rehearse and hang out afterwards till after midnight, making plans and celebrating our collective lives.

Most thirty-somethings can't dedicate that kind of time or spiritual energy to this kind of cause anymore. And despite the fact that the quality of work these days is light-years better than it ever was, there is a certain essence that is missing. This sort of level the playing field between yesterday and today, or sometimes even gives the nod to yesterday.

If we could have had today's talent and financial resources to combine with the spirit and energy we had in the early days (or vice versa), the results would have been more incredible that I could even imagine. I believe that fully.


The House

This is a similar tale in that it points to how the rewards of adulthood are offset by the responsibility that comes with it.

I spent my college years (in particular) and my early- to mid-twenties (to a lesser, but still remarkable extent) as a seasoned road-tripper. To me, a road-trip is simply an informal trek out of town with very few plans and a sense of "I'll end up where I end up and figure out a way." On road-trips, we'd never stay at hotels. We didn't always know where we'd stay, but we knew we'd find somewhere to sleep.

It wasn't always cozy—in fact, it was rarely comfortable at all! But we would find places to "crash." I slept on couches, on floors, in cars, in trailers. We'd sometimes make pillows out of a pile of our clothes bundled up. We often wouldn't even know who our host was. It would be some "friend of a friend who knew someone who could put us up."

Even after college in our early- to mid-twenties, while our trips were a little less kamikaze than the ones described earlier, we still didn't pay for hotels. We traveled a lot, as our college friends became more spread out and a lot of road-trips were taken to go to people's weddings and stuff like that. Lots of pull-out couches or sleeping bags on the floor.

I, of course, was hardly unique. All the people I knew from my college scene were like this. It's just how things were among all of us.

Well, a little over a month after I turned twenty-eight, something happened that was going to change the scope of road-tripping in our worlds and offer luxuries beyond what we'd ever known. My wife and I bought a house.

So here we were, the two of us, in our fixer-upper house, but it offered an astounding eleven rooms (including five bedrooms and two living rooms) plus a full basement. We had several real guest rooms with real, full-sized beds. Add in the couches and stuff like that and we could accommodate a whole slew of our road-tripping friends in ways we never thought possible. No more vying for the best sleeping arrangement like in the old days, where the lucky guy would get the bed, the second most lucky guy would get the couch, and the still-sort-of-lucky-guy got the beanbag! Instead, we could be like hosts from heaven that ensured that all the guests were super lucky! They'd all get a bed! Not too long ago, I had had the pleasure of sleeping in a narrow hallways and getting stepped on in the night. I had slept in the same room as a cat box. I had slept in my car. There was no way anyone would ever have to do anything like that in my place ever again, and that made me feel great.

Well, as it turns out, I never did get the chance to put up a bunch of friends. RIght around the time we bought the house is right around the time we stopped traveling. It was around the time that our friends stopped traveling, too. Everyone was employed full-time or working in earnest to get some career off the ground. People started having families. People were buying houses of their own and had all the responsibilities of homeownership that we were dealing with, too. The days of road-tripping came to an end. And around that time, I think we all started realizing that we were getting too old to be sleeping on floors, anyway, so it's not like what I could offer would have been deemed a luxury, anyway. It would be almost expected.

I always thought it would be great to have my own house so I could fill it with friends from out of town and be a great host. When I finally got the chance, we all got too busy to take advantage of the benefits of a luxury "crash pad."

posted by Steve @ 10:52 PM