At the end of Blow, Johnny Depp's character does this rude monologue from jail assessing his life.
And drops this bomb: 'Life passes most people by while they're still making grand plans for it'.
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The article is here.
But the main points of what he wrote are at the bottom of this post. Fair enough, the guy's called Jedidiah, but when you've read a fair few accounts of voyages of self-discovery and the various motivations behind them, it's rare that you come across something written in a way you've never seen before. It's serious shit.
And fair enough, the spice of life means there are different people in this world, with a whole heap of different priorities, some of whom are never going to embark on this kind of mammoth physical hardship. That's not the way the world works comes the chorus from the office blocks. Fair enough. But i dare even the most resolutely realistic of you to not take something from the below.
Some more comfortably than others, but at the end of the day if you're reading this, odds-on the manner in which you live is a choice you are able to make.
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There
was something about drawing close to 30 that felt like I was losing something.
The newness of life and career and cities and friends began to find their
comfortable patterns, and once you see the pattern, time speeds up.
That’s
why we hear old people always warning us of how fast life passes. It really
doesn’t pass by any faster than those long childhood summers, but we just lose
fascination, or I should say we lose wonder.
We
are no longer astonished by the way the world works.
Human
beings amass comfort and minimize risk as they age. I get it. I can see the
value in that. But both of those things have a tendency to diminish character.
I
am 30 now, and I don’t want a mortgage. I don’t want property-based responsibility
because I think it’ll change my brain chemistry.
It
makes you focus on protecting what you have rather than fighting for what could
be.
It
seems like the observable transition from idealism to conservatism. As for now,
I do not want that.
I
want to pursue wonder, appreciation, and adventure. I want to meet people and
learn from them and write their stories and tell others. I want to become a man
that pursues virtue and character and color and romance. It feels like the
people in our lives who seem to have done that are the ones we love most. If I
have a family some day, I want to give them a father full of stories and whimsy
and love for being alive. I see too little of that.
You
may think I am prolonging adolescence and avoiding responsibility. Well, I can
simply say that I am not impressed by grownups or their society. But I will
also say that I disagree with you.
The
choice to pursue a dream, at the destruction of my comfort, with the loss of
safety and certainty, all for the purpose of doing something that inspires
others to a fuller life of wonder and creativity and quality, to me that is a
burden of responsibility worth carrying.
To me, that is growing up.
To me, that is growing up.
To me the spice of life revolves predominantly around Mrs Cullen, a can of whipped cream and this badman...http://www.amazon.co.uk/Encore-Lionel-Richie/dp/B00007E9XU.....GYETT!
ReplyDeleteyou put GYETT in the link dickwad. Encore is big!
ReplyDelete