2 Days To Dudes: "I Can't Wait"

When I was a kid, I loved reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books. They books were the literary equivalent of a maze, novels that let the reader decide what the main character’s next move would be and then provided multiple endings that corresponded to the reader’s choice. The books were (and probably still are) enormously popular with children, which is no surprise since children generally don’t feel like they have much control over their lives.

When we are young, we dream of the day when we’ll be old enough to determine our own fate, to make our own way in the world, to seize days, to move mountains. But as we get older we begin to realize that, whether we want to admit it or not, the Universe does not revolve around us and is infinitely larger than our wishes and desires for it. We suddenly get a very real sense of our own insignificance and mortality. We think about the idealism of our youth and see that it was usually more a badge of identity than an actual intention. We look forward to our old age and see nothing, nothing except the examples our elders have set for us.

There are two logical paths forward from this point: Suicide or Acceptance. The first is obviously a quick, simple and relatively boring solution. The second probably takes more than a lifetime to truly achieve.

I used to think acceptance was the same as ‘settling for,’ i.e. giving up. But acceptance is simply acknowledging that you have very little control over things. You can plan, create, make goals, network, achieve, etc. as much as you want, but you will never really know what the outcome of any of these activities is going to be. You’ll never know what they mean to you until they mean something to you. It’s all up for grabs.

I once attempted to control my world through a lot of different means: creativity, exercise, eating, planning, drinking… let’s take drinking, for example. When I started drinking in my late teens, I thought I was expanding the boundaries of my mind, breaking down inhibitions, opening myself up to new possibilities. And I probably was, at first. But when I found myself still abusing alcohol in my mid-thirties, it finally occurred to me that there was no more mind expansion going on, that, in fact, I was merely repeating a behavior because it was familiar and it gave me a sense of control over my environment. Getting loaded was as sensible for me as creating a revenue report would be for an accountant. I drank because I couldn’t accept that I ultimately had no control over my life.

I used to wake up and be immediately gripped with worry and fear about how I was going to control the day, which was quickly followed by shame and guilt about the fact that I would, most likely, fuck it up. I am done with that shit. The idea of not having control is frightening, but it is where the real adventure begins. “I Can’t Wait” was meant to be an acknowledgement of the fact that every day is a story, one that we are not writing. In real life, you don’t have to choose your own adventure; just jump headfirst into the one you get handed every morning.