Cheating the Universe

This is the blurb I wrote for the "About Me" section of my website (currently on its way to becoming more interactive and awesome).  Comments are ever so welcome!

Cheating the Universe

I’ve always had an insatiable desire to do absolutely everything. It never occurred to me as a less than precocious (but dangerously curious) child of eight that I could not, in fact, sing like Judy Garland, dance like Gene Kelly, paint like Picasso, compose like Bach, swordfight like that angry Spanish guy from Princess Bride and cook like Julia Child. It never even crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be able do all these things in every country (in every time period) simultaneously. I wanted to wear the stiff, poofy Victorian dresses and summon the butler with a bell that dinged just so. I wanted to tromp around in the Amazon mostly naked and with my right breast carved off so I could aim my arrows more effectively. I wanted to wear one of those sultry red dresses and Argentinian tango the night away with a rose between my teeth. I --

I was twelve when I finally realized that I had only one life to live and that this life would be dreadfully short and had the potential of being rather dull. Although technology had progressed by leaps and bounds since I was a mere child of eight, there was still a dismal deficit of time machines on amazon.com (even though I searched regularly). So no matter how early I set my alarm in the morning, I couldn’t possibly manage to accomplish everything on my expansive list of “Aimee’s Adventures!” Not as a human being with a lousy 85 year life expectancy and no time machine.

I found all this to be incredibly unfair. It was like the universe was taunting me.

“You see? You see all the fantastically exciting and fabulously bizarre things other people got to do? Oh, it’s just sublime being the Universe. You’re stuck in the podunk town of Rifle, Colorado, but I’m everywhere all at once. You’ll probably keel over dead in a few years from some painful disease, but I’m old enough to be a part of everything that ever was and everything that ever will. Death must be terrible for you. Really, it’s... it’s quite unfortunate that your DNA will unravel and your body will break down and, and -- what’s that? I’m sorry, could you speak up? You’re just so impossibly small and my hearing hasn’t been the same since the age of the dinosaurs. My, how those Tyrannosauruses used to roar. Say something helpful? Mmm... well, I suppose you could go down to that dreary old building you call, a ... what was it? Museum? Yes, why don’t you go down to the museum and look at some old bones or something. Then you can feel properly sad about what you missed. Goodness, don’t grouch at me, you cantankerous little squirt. It’s isn’t my fault you were born before the invention of the time machine and after the Fountain of Youth was accidentally vaporized when you damn Yankees went and bombed Japan.”

So I decided to try acting. If I couldn’t do everything, at least I could pretend to do everything.

Unfortunately, acting turned out to be rather unsatisfying. Like milk made from rice or meat made from something that could or could not be a mixture of soybeans, wheat protein and a tin of cat food (made from a mixture of soybeans, wheat protein and a tin of rat food (made from god knows what)). It just wasn’t REAL.

I get to play Cleopatra... I get to pretend to seduce Marc Antony... But I want a real Marc Antony, dammit. Brock is a decent enough sort of fellow and I certainly don’t mind seducing him (even though he’s quite definitively gay), but I’m just... tired of having to live through other people to make my life interesting. I want to BE interesting. Me. Not Cleopatra.

I graduated anyway. I was told degrees were important and that having one wouldn’t be all that bad, so I buckled down, studied hard, and completed my BA at the top of my class. Even though theatre was a distressing disappointment to the naïve little girl inside me who perpetually pined to do everything, the young adult me was still having a jolly good time gasping at fake blood and bursting into big fake tears over devastatingly handsome fake dead lovers.  As a matter of fact, I didn’t find learning how to use a broadsword, to tap dance, to insult someone in iambic pentameter and to sing alto one in eight part harmony tremendously inconvenient at all. I loved breathing life into characters and taking audiences on wild rides through the absurd, poetic and violent worlds of Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare and David Mamet.

But I don’t want to spend my life riding someone else’s roller coaster and I don’t want all my kicks to be vicarious.

I felt lost when I graduated. Theatre had taught me a good many skills (the kinds employers don’t really care for but are handy at parties) and one of them was an acute sense of self-awareness. So when I graduated university in 2010, I was acutely aware of how very lost I felt. I knew that I wanted something other than theatre, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted, how to get what I didn’t know I wanted or where to start.

So I sat down and did some more of that self-awareness thing.

I don’t know what I want out of my life, but I do know what I don’t want in myself. I don’t want to be so ridiculously bad at meeting people. I don’t want to panic when I get lost. I don’t want to always be dreaming of the future and never living in the present. How can I direct my path in such a way that I am forced to change these things?

I can travel.

Yes. Travel will keep me meeting strangers, getting epically lost and staying present. Travel will remove the obstacles that prevent me from living fully. And once I am free of these limitations, perhaps I will see what I want out of life.

Leaving behind family and friends was frightening, so I created a little blog playfully titled, “The Gallivanting Grasshopper” as a way to feel less alone.

My adventure commenced in Madrid. I’d discovered a week-long English immersion program for Spaniards where I would be required to speak to strangers for 16+ hours every day. Yes, I thought when I boarded the plane with a mixture of terror and triumph. What better way to become less ridiculously bad at meeting people?

“If you hear a voice that says “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and the voice will be silenced.”

-Van Gogh

After the English program had finished loosening my tongue (for better or worse), I continued west to a little town near the border of Portugal where I achieved my certificate to teach yoga vinyasa. Yoga had become vitally important during university (which wasn’t all grins and giggles, regardless of how many fake jokes at which I fake laughed), and I wanted to be able to share the peaceful mind, joyful spirit and healthy body the practice had given me.

I also had a vague notion of someday becoming a yoga teacher who does theatre as opposed to a waitress who does theatre. 

But we’ll see if that’s what I want out of life.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”

~George Addair

In exploring my fear, I will find my passion.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

~Anais Nin

I want a big life.

So I kept traveling. I flew east to Italy and volunteered at an agritourismo in a small town nearly as podunk as Rifle. I flew north to Ireland and learned about permaculture and training Irish Thoroughbreds. I flew south to France to –

The more I moved, the more I started to feel that this... this is what I want. Always being a fish out of water, always meeting interesting people who challenge the way I think and always seeing places that force me to appreciate the beauty of the world in which I live.

I felt like I had somehow cheated the Universe.

“Look here, you big bully,” I said to no one and everyone in particular. “I may have less than a century to gallivant across this gigantic, glorious globe, but I can still fill my limited years to bursting with the kinds of experiences that make me feel like I was born sometime between this morning and infinity ago. You want examples, eh? Have you looked out across the French Alps lately? 

Are you watching the sunset off the coast of Turkey -- 

 -- or listening to the waves thunder against the Cliffs of Moher? 

"Good. What do you feel? Bumpy? Boiling? Bludgeoned? What do I feel? Well, I feel old. I look and listen and understand that I am a part of the wonder I see. You say you’ve always been here... well, so have I, you pompous squasher of dreams. Wasn’t it that Mayber guy who figured out the whole "conservation of energy" thing? Perhaps I am a spectacularly insignificant combination of flowers from those jagged mountains, fish from that glistening sea and rock from those majestic cliffs. I am wind and earth and water and fire and some of the other elements on that table I never got around to memorizing. Like you."

"This morning? Right. I feel like I was born this morning because although I know I am a part of everything, experiencing parts of everything makes me realize I really don’t know much of anything at all."

"Yeah, yeah, you’re bigger than I am. But what time do you have? Now? Whoa, me too. What place to you have? Here? NO WAY. That’s totally what I’ve got. Here and now.”

Here and now.

“You can keep dreaming about your dead dinosaurs. I’m living out of a backpack now and haven’t got room for bones.”

I started traveling to find out what I wanted out of life. I kept traveling because I quickly discovered that travel is my life.

When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life.

~John Lennon

I keep writing because I want to kindle sparks of curiosity in those who read about my adventures. I want the people who follow this journey to feel encouraged to mindfully explore their own fears in search of their passions. This your world, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you choose to spend your years in the town in which you were born or to wander from here to there to anywhere. Be curious. Wherever you may be, always approach your surroundings with the mind of a beginner who never forgets to ask questions.

And remember that you only have two things.

You have here.

You have now.

How you will use them is entirely up to you, but...

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

~Mark Twain