One day, while passing on my daily trot to work, I had a thought. It's worth mentioning that the trot itself is not too shabby.......
.........and almost looks like a city. And brings me to the historic Fort Point neighborhood, which hosts Boston's artist community.
Anyway, something made me think of a conducting student I once knew named Tom Whatshisface. He was a large Welshman with all the joviality of Jove: a fair round belly, hands like bear claws, and a doughy face that was always ready for a laugh. One day over a cuppa in the caf (or, more likely, a pint in the pub), he told some of us youngsters about his path. It started with a stipend to study composition in Poland. From there, he made his way to a teaching position in Greece, which he gave up to follow a girl to Norway, where he continued his music studies and cultivated an interest in Arabic liturature (!). He picked up and went to the Sudan for a while, studying and travelling, eventually going back and forth between Wales and Holland (was it for another girl?), and then Wales and the States, where his conducting studies had finally taken him.
I listened with greed. My semester abroad had given me a hunger to not only see the world, but live in as many places as possible. I wanted to know his secrets- how did he manage to accomplish so much, live in so many places, have so many lives?
We met over lunch and he gave me more of the details. But he told the story without joy, and with a distant look. The cosmopolitan life is not as easy as it sounds, apparently, and there were bumps in the path: one of the girls got pregnant along the way, and the subsequent marriage and divorce and leftover child are the banes of his existence. He spoke with nostalgia of the people he left behind, and likely will never see again. He doesn't feel as if he has roots anywhere, and expressed that all those years in different places were just wasted time in the end, as professional contacts in one place don't mean a professional life somewhere else.
I remembered Tom when I was thinking of this: What if your dreams are really blind alleys? What if you trust your instincts, but it turns out that your instincts are dead wrong? What if happiness eludes you while you're busy chasing happiness? These thoughts came to mind as I headed to my practical day job, having given up who knows what sorts of destinies.
Truthfully though, these melancholy thoughts seem less relevant to me right now. It is deep winter, and bone-chilling cold has finally joined us. Valentine's Day in Boston literally looked like Hell frozen over. But there's a warmth that's thawing out my stubborn anxieties, and I think I'm ready to give my intellect a rest, and let my instincts lead me. At least for matters of the heart......
Ages ago I heard a radio interview with a woman who had had an extraordinary career in publishing, but did not fulfill her original dream of having a family. "I sometimes think that if I had made other choices I could have gone on to have a family and children and all that," she concluded. "But if I could do it all again I would do it the same way and even make the same mistakes. I would do it knowing what those mistakes were and what the consequences would be, because I believe in following your heart."
Enough with the morality, just check out this guy. He has a way of making T stations look the Baths of Caracalla.....
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