Something to Reach for

It barely even matters what it is….

Looking back on my late teenage years and into most of my twenties, I notice a very strange thing; everyone was skinny.

I grew up in a small (then unincorporated) town on the edge of a mid-sized city which was half hour or so from a larger city.

We were in that larger city’s orbit – but just barely.

Not all of us had cars. But we all had bicycles.

And one way or another, we were all reaching – if only to get out of our small town.

Most of us did – or at least made some kind of peace with it.

Some of us found our part of the rainbow. Some of us kept the restless search going – but not necessarily by choice.

I thought every single one of us was set on fire to search and reach for something we knew we didn’t have, even as we barely could envision what it could be.

Some of us back then played musical instruments. In the larger culture, guitar and piano were popular, but few of my friends stopped there; one played oboe, another bassoon.

Some wrote poetry, some wrote meandering observations about their encounters and experiences.

But it seems that we all, in our own way, sought to make sense of this puzzle we found ourselves in. With infinite moving parts, changing roles, war, illness and opportunity on every horizon, growing up – and finding a role in the community was a challenge; as it always is – and finding an anchor of reliable adulthood was rare indeed.

Kind of like, actually much like, now.

Back then, they might have been hard to find, but there were, to use a current phrase “adults in the room”.

But there don’t seem to be any now. And few people, especially young people, seem to be reaching. And no one is skinny. And few of us are finding, or making, anything like a peace with the world.

The young people I see and encounter have a sense that they are on something like a social assembly line, like a piece of raw material being shaped and sanded, pushed into shape with various attachments fastened on.

I don’t see young people reaching. I don’t see young people hungry – and wanting more.

I see young people stuffed and distracted – almost paralyzed – having everything handed to them – or forced on them.

I hope I’m wrong about this.

What I see, or seem to be seeing, can’t be good. Or real.

There is something like a fire of humanity going out in their eyes. And not just theirs.

Maybe the light in the eyes of young people is something like the pilot light of humanity – or of an era. A generation.

Look at what we spend our money on. What we invest our time in. What we focus on and pay attention to.

When I was young, nobody I knew had much money, but we saved what we could, and spent it on what we really wanted.

Current young people (and a lot of not so young people) seem to squander money as soon as they get it – not on what they “want” but on the first distraction they see. And there are many.

Most adults are not so different.

And they are the same way with their time and attention.

When I was young, people read actual books, newspapers and journals – words that stood still, didn’t need batteries or have flashing lights or chirps – and that we would share, and talk about.

We had very few screens. Life was not “virtual” – it was “actual”.

And life – in all of its expressions and protuberances – often hurt.

Life back then was not packaged and prepared for us. Few of us, or at least people I knew, had anything like academic or career “tracks”. We just kind of hurtled through time and space as if that was the only thing to do. Or at least it’s what I did.

I certainly could have been more productive – as could many of my peers. But we made good, bad and terrible choices in life and found ourselves drifting, falling and occasionally aligning with cultures, subcultures, communities, beliefs, philosophies and at the forming gel-like genesis of trends that have lingered for generations.

Some of us sought refuge or solace in existing institutions and systems – some of us established our own. And some of us leaned on the existing institutions and systems so hard that they couldn’t hold.

We worked and wondered and reached in all kinds of directions and kept asking questions. Or at least most of us did.

Some of us were satisfied with the answers we got to our questions. But many were not. We didn’t know it then, but asking questions is not always welcome – and not always safe.

We were always reaching, but we didn’t always know what we were reaching for.

Some even seemed to take hold of an elusive dream, but most of us saw our ideals and vision packaged or compromised by opportunists – some our own age. And some who should have known better.

A common term, as I write this is “touch grass”. This is shorthand for “do something real – something solid and natural”.

In my young adult years everything was real and solid – sometimes brutally real and solid.

But young people are not solid.

We, the young people, often found ourselves slammed up against systems and social mechanisms that taunted us and promised us glistening success across unyielding and often hazardous divides. And many of us paid dearly for our encounters with inflexible barriers.

Many of us carried callouses, bruises and scars as proof.

Life was not mediated or packaged. Or planned. Road trips and excursions were launched with little – to no – prep time. It’s a wonder we survived.

Road trips meant actual roads – not freeways with rest stops and fast food at every exit – it meant isolated towns, cheap motels and flat tires in the middle of nowhere. Without cell phones.

Our adventures were as exhilarating as they were improvisational.

And, of course, some quests, encounters and relationships were as disastrous as they were serendipitous.

Some of us never came back. Some came back with harrowing stories to tell. A few came back with stories too harrowing to tell.

Most, if not all of us had the sense, or belief, in some kind of karma or justice that was somehow in the atmosphere, around, maybe even within, each one of us.

We had this driving sense that our destiny was ours alone, that we could take it, frame it, claim it and make it into a shape and form that, in most cases, the world had never seen before.

I can’t decide if, in retrospect, that seems vain, ridiculous or glorious.

But whatever it is, young people don’t have it now.

Yes, it was precarious, inherently dangerous, borderline preposterous – on a regular basis – if that is even possible. But life was a flickering candle-like flame in a blustering wind, and every moment shone and glistened with possibility.

We rarely used words like “impossible” or even “stupid”. Safety gear barely existed for kids back then. Safety gear was for work – not for play. We did what we could, for better or worse, with what we had.

Kids now seem to focus on what they don’t have. It rarely, if ever, occurred to us to focus on what wasn’t there.

What is there, is us, in the moment, in what we have and what we can reach for in the crystalline moment in the light and perhaps judgment of a seemingly infinite distance.

Some speak of a Creator, but I am convinced that we were created in the image of the Reacher, the infinite Reacher.