"It is good to see you, George. Not that I ever forgot you. You gave me so much."
"What did I give you?"
"You taught me about concentration. At first I thought that meant just being still, but I was to understand, it meant much more. You meant to tell me to be where I was, not some place in the past or future. I worried too much about tomorrow.
What about you, are you working on something new?"
For the past few months, I've been obsessing about the perfect week--and by perfect, I don't mean the sexscapade. Instead, I imagined my 30's would feel like those weekly TV sitcoms I grew up with.
And by sitcom standards, life was an eclectic apartment, spontaneous visits from friends and family, a fit body, work that sorted itself out, and the weekly event that drove the storyline of my life gradually, inevitably forward.
It feels naive when I idealise fiction, but it was the best model I could find at the time. From my side of the TV screen, there weren't many exemplars to choose from. In real life, most people I knew had a less than picture-perfect home, or complicated friends, and that one difficult relative, or that tenacious love-handle, plus the daily dosage of blood-pressure medicine. And when it came to their jobs, everyone had their own unique miasma of work grievances.
But as if part of good storytelling, everyone eked out a living somehow despite the un-ideal. In my young mind I thought, "That must be what being an adult was about: always moving on."
Nowadays, my life hasn't been moving on as much as I'd like it to. Most mornings I wake up to the question, "Am I OK to repeat the same old yesterday until the day I die? Is this what feeling mature is like?" No, I just feel old.
The solution to this rut, I thought, was to fashion the perfect week: maintain a clean apartment, a few drinks with friends, an intimate call with family, two or three sweaty workouts, and work deftly managed.
Maybe if I get all that done, I'll feel like I'm moving again, and with luck, one morning wake up renewed.
"Stop worrying if your vision is new
Let others make that decision, they usually do
You keep moving on
Just keep moving on
Anything you do
Let it come from you
Then it will be new
Give us more to see"
Photo Credit: Musical Theatre Repertory at USC
BGM: "Move On" by Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford from "Sunday in the Park with George"
