Today has been truly blessed. Each day feels like a true blessing right now. Something about this time is very important for me. I bought a Wurlizter piano today… from the 70’s. It’s been a dream of mine to own one of these beautiful instruments for a while. Thank God for facebook marketplace and a time where people might see some treasures collecting dust that they want to get rid of. I feel so blessed. One note is out of tune beyond my ability to slide the reed into place, but that’s the only issue with it. It sounds beautiful.
Anyways, onto what I’m writing about. Late night thoughts. Actually, this thought in particular was spurred on by a conversation with a good friend of mine about navigating relationships and people’s expectations of what you’re supposed to be.
Ideals. we have so many of them - the way we think things need to be for us to be happy, fulfilled, and secure. From a young age, ideals are given to us to help us build an identity and to help us find a position in this vast world. They help us make things black and white in a world that is full of infinite color. But, what happens when we begin to find that life is not as simple as we thought? What happens when our experiences begin to contradict all the ideals we once thought to be absolute and uncompromising? Life is funny this way. It seems that almost anytime we begin to feel like we’ve figured things out, another mystery is around the corner waiting to show us that we aren’t as enlightened as we’d like to think. At least… that’s how my life is.
Today, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the ideals that my 18 year old self would have held. I thought it would be both humorous and enlightening to put myself in his shoes and make an honest list of all the ideals that I held then - to list the black and white truths I was so sure of, and to also list the things I thought I needed in order for my life to be meaningful. Then I thought I’d take that list compare it to a list of the ideals I hold now - on this day, May 3rd of 2020.
So, on the first list are things I thought I knew or things I thought I needed in life to be meaningful when I was 18, compared to how I view those same things now on the second list. It works best if you read each ideal on the first list compared to the corresponding response on the second list.
18 year old Andrew’s ideals:
I need to become famous to be valuable
I need to become famous for God. The more famous I am, the more I can do for God.
If I live a good life, God will be pleased
God loves me because I don’t do the bad stuff that most other people do.
I need to marry someone to experience love
I need to marry someone really hot to feel like a man, to feel like I won a game.
I need everyone to like me.
I need to become as desirable as possible. Develop skills to become attractive to the kinds of people that rejected you when you were young (informs #9)
Girls like guys who play music. Lean into this identity because it makes you more desirable, which makes you more valuable to the space you’re in.
I need to agree with you to be in relationship with you.
People who drink, do drugs, and have sex are worse people than people who don’t.
When I grow up, I need to have a massive platform
27 year old Andrew’s ideals:
fame doesn’t equal meaning. people knowing your name is just that… people knowing your name.
I need to become present for God. The more present I am, the more useful I become.
God is pleased.
God loves me because God is good.
I’ve been experiencing love my whole life.
I’ll marry someone who suddenly makes it all worth it. I’ve been watching marriages closely and it’s true what they’ve always said. It’s hard. It’s a sacrifice. But I do believe that while love requires sacrifice, love will feel worth it. Worth it all. Until I feel that, I will appreciate the time I have now.
Not everyone will like me. In the same way I cannot understand other good intentioned people, people won’t understand a good-intentioned me. and that’s that.
If I continue investing so much time and effort into making myself appear desirable, I will continue feeling alone.
I play music because I love it, not because it makes you lovable. I just love it now.
I want to see everyone’s “big picture.” We are all more than our opinions and behind all of that, we’re just people wanting to connect.
People are broken. Partying takes the edge off. There are people who don’t party that I can’t stand and there’s people who party hard that have amazing hearts. And there’s everything in between. I can’t judge anyone, but I know that at some point we all need to face our lives soberly if we want to grow.
When I grow up, I want to embody love.
It’s so wild how much we change. How life changes us. When I was 18 I thought I knew how it all worked. And today as I’m writing this I’m thinking, “wow I know so much about life now.” But, even what I believe now will likely change over the years.
It feels like life gets more and more complicated, but it feels like my ideals are simplifying at the same time. It feels like I really need less now than I did before to feel like myself and to feel like my life has meaning. I’ve found myself in a place where I’ve lived through enough unseen turns to know better than to make my own plans and expect them to work out just like I thought they would. I’m also seeing now that everything I used to judge has turned out to be an issue that was within myself the whole time, not an issue out there. Our ideals will inevitably be challenged by our lives.
This reflection was a reminder to me to be open-handed with my ideals, but to be uncompromising in my faith, which I often equate with love. I think both sides can and should exist simultaneously. Faith, to me, is the foundation that allows me to live somewhat joyfully and lovingly through this unpredictable, mysterious and often painful journey. Maybe I’ll do this again in ten years and see where I’m at then.
Thanks for reading.
AB