Head in a bucket

I turned sixty and started grappling with existential angst about what little I had done with my life.... I decided the remedy to all this malaise was for me to chase an elevated dream, an extreme dream, something that would require utter conviction and unwavering passion, something that would make me be my best self in every aspect of my life, every minute of every day because the dream was so big that I couldn't get there without that kind of behavior and that kind of conviction.
--Diana Nyad, TED Talk

Cue "Climb Every Mountain," which was my High School Senior Class Song.

I have spent my life hurling myself at one passion after another (sometimes an intimate passion, sometimes an artistic or political passion) with exactly that Diana Nyad kind of intensity. Everything major I've done has been an act of passion. I've never known what it would cost, or whether I could finish or achieve it. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it was a life-wrecking disaster. The nature of risk is that you don't always succeed. But there is a deep contradiction between living for a dream and living in the present moment. I'm newly ambivalent about extreme dreams. When I listened to Diana Nyad's TED talk, some alarms went off in my psyche. Some red flags waved and snapped.

In order to achieve an extreme dream, you have to focus. You have to chase that dream so hard that you miss what's going on around you. I've done that; and while some of my extreme dreams have come true, I missed much of what went on while I was alive. I can't remember whole years of my children's lives; I never watched movies, TV, or listened to popular music; I didn't play games or cook. I missed popular culture altogether. I'm at peace with how it went, but now, it might be that the way of balance is well-rounded mindfulness.

Maybe some people need to go for an extreme dream. Especially if they haven't done that yet. And maybe, although I have a hankering for a new passion, I could try reading poetry, listening to the radio (I'll have to figure out what station plays popular music--in fact I'm not sure what popular music sounds like, though I'm learning from Folkiebooknerd, Spitzimixi, and Booky Goatherd). Maybe it's time for me to learn to make a souffle or  to stroll about aimlessly as I do when I'm looking for a blip. That is unfamiliar to me and feels dangerously unfocused and wasteful; it scares me more than pursuing a passion, but I am newly ambivalent about the ways extreme dreaming over-focuses us on some future goal.

I was stumping around with these thoughts this afternoon when I came upon this odd assemblage outside a cooperative artist workshop building. To me it looks like this guy got his head stuck in his bucket list.