Grown Up Solutions

It's been over one month since The Beastie Boys' Adam 'MCA' Yauch died of cancer, at the age of 47.  For some reason, I went very much into the cliched meltdown of a person who finds out that someone not-that-much-older-than-me has passed away, and that death has been all too untimely.  Perhaps it's that this wasn't the death of someone "old", but rather someone who I actually listened to, and whose music I still identify with my high school and undergraduate days.  I also couldn't help but think about how productive and full a life MCA had (inevitably and self-indulgently comparing it to my own state of stagnation!).  He was still relatively young, but had packed in so much, personally and professionally.  The Beastie Boys were (for the vast majority of the band's career) three white Jewish guys who ended up blazing their own trail in a style that - until they came on the scene - was largely thought of as belonging exclusively to blacks.

Whether it was conscious or not, I admire the certainty they must have had about what they were embarking on.  I imagine that any creative person has to love what they do, and have a healthy belief that they are good enough at it to eek out a living doing it.  These guys were very young when they started out in a fickle industry.  In stark contrast, when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I was happily living in the bubble of university.  My biggest crises back then involved having to walk through the silent Baillieu library with my noisy (pfft-pffft-pfft-pfft) cords. 

Perhaps we've grown up having our parents' and grandparents' mentalities about life thrust onto us, that makes change so hard and fraught with anxiety.  I still marvel at my grandparents, and several of my friends' parents, many of whom came out here with nothing, having made a massive journey to somewhere they had no previous experience of.  I fretted over my moving to America, yet I had a job and a roof over my head, all set up well before I even got on that plane.  Not to mention knowing the language.   

We still see change as being associated with failure, or the result of poor decisions made earlier in our lives.  Yet it's quite normal these days to bounce from one job to another, even one path of study to another.  We think it's a great thing for others to do, just not ourselves.  We just don't seem to allow it.  It's probably at the heart of my hate for Gen Y.  I envy the certainty that so many of them have, about everything.  Not to mention their apparent indifference, again, to everything.  On a bad day, I tend to call this certainty and indifference, arrogance.  Maybe because it also amplifies my own feelings of being overly analytical and cautious, so much so, that this fear and caution has previously frozen me into a state of complete inaction.  Argh.

Cliched reactions aside, these days I definitely waste less time on trivial things, and am better at recognising them for being trivial.  That's not to say I don't worry about things at all, I'm just a bit more choosy about what's actually worth the effort.