Something Else

I recently finished a book by the author James Salter.  It was a story about a young married couple who divorced in middle age, showing how the different choices they made in how to live their lives in the following years played out.  It wasn't especially riveting reading but it did make me think about how my actions lead to good outcomes or bad outcomes - at least in the traditional sense of those words - and how the things we think we want sometimes don't bring us much pleasure and how sometimes they do.  The woman chose a simple life in a rustic cottage, close to the things she had always known, and the man took a more exotic path.  The choices worked and they didn't work.   Each character was glad for the life they had chosen most of the time but were occasionally disconsolate that they hadn't done something else.

Something Else!!  I'm always worried that I'm not doing the right thing.  If I was only doing Something Else!! then I'd be happy.

It made me ponder warm, familiar routines and it made me long for new adventures.  They're both great and I can have both, but I can't have both of them at the same time.  I get myself into trouble when I'm doing one and pining for the other, which I do far too often.  The grass is always greener, etc. etc. 

Part of the trip from which I just returned involved a certain tearing away.  I saw what was and how it had changed and where I was now.  Take the county fair, for instance: it was so cool walking those familiar lanes, between food booths and amusement rides and carnival barkers, seeing how many things have not changed much over the last 50 years.  At the same time, it was somehow tired.  It was something that I had done and I couldn't do again.  I wanted to have walked those lanes every year for the last 50 years while being in a small town in rural France.  I want to take a good book and sit under an old tree, reading the day away, and I want to be on a fan boat barreling down a tributary of the Amazon, strange birds calling to me from the trees.

I want it ALL!