The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans.
We are not swans. We are sharks. – Ryan Bingham, “Up in the Air”
At some point we all felt invincible. Whether we were the greatest superhero or could create one panacea after another or be the genius of tomorrow, childish fancy of invincibility were there. We could do something, be something.
As we grow older, this sense of invincibility dies down for most, arguably peaked during young adulthood and then mostly degraded into hazy, vague memory when the world takes its toll with the chipping of reality. Relationships, jobs, households, security – wrapping into the practicality of life, we slowly die down into a stagnation of comfort, no longer motivated to continue the pursuit of invincibility.
For some, that is. For the restless others, not so much.
Restlessness rebels against this life course. It stems from the childish desire to feel invincible, to feel more than a mere mortal, to become a significant being in the finite span of life. A constant dissonance, a continuous disharmony, a ceaseless thought process – the childish restlessness that manifests into a constant movement of the mind.
Set perceptions on limits and capabilities are rational, yes, but such ideas can be simultaneously helpful and harmful. For some, these ideas are a governing principle, a road map to their possibilities and successes in life – the elegant, beautiful swans; for others, these ideas are a suffocating assumption, a chain from pursuing beyond the practical, to go beyond what is simply tangible – the restless, moving sharks.
To be restless is a gamble against perceived and palpable limits that ends either in success or failure, all or nothing. We like to see those lottery winners, those success stories that made it, but the cruel truth is that not everyone will make it, and in the greatest likelihood a majority of dreamers will fail for lack of resource, opportunity, support, or plain old luck. And in this world, society is unforgiving to those who fail.
Does this mean we stop dreaming, hoping, wishing? Does this mean we must all be practical, rational, logical?
God no. It just means we need a little bit of perspective, a little bit of growing up to do, something anew to set us into a more promising future with the same hopes intact. It means we as humans need to keep learning for our own sake in life and existence.
Dreamers are necessary, pragmatists are essential. In order to get anything done in this world, you need a nice bit of both. A functioning human can neither be a drifting butterfly nor a cold robot – the extremities contradict what is even human. More pressingly, though, is a perspective of one’s self in the scheme of all things, that as a tiny being we are neither insignificant nor significant, unnecessary yet essential.
Keep dreaming, stay practical. Stay restless, know limits. Be both a swan and a shark. Remain mortal and become invincible. It’s one of the hardest lessons that I’m still trying to learn in this little bubble of mine.