December 13 - Action

When it comes to aspirations, it’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step?

What is this new obsession with ideas and making things happen? When did a nice way of delving into the hearts and minds of regular people turn into a rat race for some hazy, distant prize of...what? I’m still trying to figure this out. Is it money? Fame? Recognition? It’s not enough that we get to live a life largely without constant hunger, pain, grief or hopelessness – we want our big fat future reward too. We want a trophy that will prove to ourselves, and to those around us, that this life of ours really means something.

I’ll tell you what: my biggest idea that I want to make happen in 2011 is to get us through another year alive. Not because we’re poor or unhealthy, and not because we live in a country with appalling human rights or natural-disaster-prone geography, but for the simple fact that life is fucking random. Pardon my language, but this is something that has yet to cease mattering more to me than anything else I can distract myself with. You could be standing on solid rock or hanging by a thread, but you will never know which it is; the treadmill stops for nobody, and it’s both hard and easy to put a foot wrong when you’re perpetually stepping into the future.

If I can make it through the next fifty years without dying (or losing the people that matter most to me before I do), then I will consider that my greatest achievement. My next biggest idea-turned-action is to raise a boy who can know all this without having it break his heart; who can live as though each day matters, and be grateful if that’s the only thing he has to feel grateful for.

I've been forgetting to include my advent calendar prompts, which are meant to propel these ideas along. Today's calendar door revealed a pair of chintzy, glass ornaments. So there you go.

Written in participation with #Reverb10. Read my complete set of posts here.