February 12, 2010
Dear Brad:
You don’t know this yet, but you have amazing pathways emerging in front of you. I wish I could sit down with you, spend time explaining what’s in store for you. I’m told that would ruin the fun. I am told this by people who believe that “everything happens for a reason” and “your experiences makes you who you are.”
These are well-meaning people. And those two ideas are absolutely true. But they are simply ways we justify our past. They are not how we plan our future.
And we’re here to talk about your future. More specifically, we are here to talk about beginnings.
The next year of your life will be hard, almost from exactly this day. I didn’t really think about this until just now but it’s true. In the next 12 months, you will experience the end of your path with baseball – that thing you have loved for so long – and the beginning of a new one with writing – that thing you will love for the rest of your life.
You will meet the first woman who you will love with all of your heart, and she will do worse than dislike you. She will be indifferent. For three years. When you finally win her, you will let your insecurities destroy that love. A fact you won’t quite recover from for a very long time.
You will have your first adult girlfriend. She will leave you because you have your eyes set off into the future, on some adventure that is yet unplanned but most certainly coming. You will hear this refrain many times over throughout your life.
You will discover that you love learning, but you do not love classrooms. There are very few professors who inspire you, so you will begin exploring the country. You will travel, slowly at first, throughout the surrounding tri-state area with no plan or reason. You will get in a car, drive for some time period, and sleep in truck stops to save money. You will befriend anyone who makes eye contact with you.
You will return home to failing grades, fading friendships and crushing loneliness. You will feel out of place in the university world you have placed yourself, always trying to mask your insecurities either with a loud, brutal force or a wilting, quiet disappearing act. You will have no middle ground. You will ensure that you are not exposed by keeping people at a distance.
You will experience your first one-night stand, your first literary group, your first coffee shop writing. You will seek a solace in all three of these experiences repeatedly throughout your life, grasping for moments of meaningfulness in a world you increasingly feel detached from.
You will experience your first serious alcohol problem, ending with some of your newest friends abandoning you. Rightfully and righteously. You will step foot in Alcoholic Anonymous for the first time, where you will be met by a broken, drunken man who yells at you to keep drinking and come back in twenty years. (That you decide to take his advice above others is telling of what will come).
I am not telling you this because I hope that you somehow avoid the mistakes. They are yours and, if I know myself, I would not listen to advice anyway. Besides, mistakes are part of the process. Oh boy howdy is life a process. There’s no way to really understand how it works without getting your hands dirty. And brother, you are going to get your hands dirty.
I’m telling you this because I have some practical advice that you won’t learn for a long time. A very long time. So I thought I’d let you know now, in hopes that it will sink in sooner.
- Don’t take life so seriously. In the end, all of those fears and horrors we carry around don’t amount to much. They are merely moments in space-time. They pass. They are forgotten. You will miss so many opportunities because you are stuck in those moments.
- Play. Never forget that all of this doesn’t matter. Take seriously your responsibilities, but make time every day to remember you’re just a slightly larger little monkey than you used to be.
- Love, greatly and deeply. You will fight this emotion. We all do. It makes us vulnerable. Or that’s what you think. It’s a long time before you realize it’s a scaffolding, that thing builders use to brace incomplete objects until they can exist on their own. Those scaffoldings are removed, leaving in place a solitary object that seems impossible to build. Yet the existence of the structure lets us know the scaffolding was there. The two structures – the individual and the brace — are tied together, even when you can’t see them.
- Never worry about making a fool of yourself over a woman. You’ll try very hard to protect yourself from humiliation and embarrassment. You will hide from life instead of embracing it. This will lead to the still-discussed, four-year crush on the arty girl who lives in Dodds Hall (and eventually Havinghurst Hall). You will never speak to her even though you see her every day (and continued after college as well since she lived near you). Some of your greatest moments in life will be those times that you shed that fear and take a chance.
- Help. The most amazing moments of your life will not be yours. They will come because of other people. So help as many people as you can.
- Never know a stranger. You will go through periods of your life when you meet people from all over the world. These are infinitely better times than when you retreat into your own head. We are all stuck on this rock. The sooner we get to know each other, the better.
- Being a leader brings with it responsibility. People will follow you. They gravitate towards you. You will not use this personal trait very well. You will roll over people, hurt them and confuse them. You will shirk your responsibility. Do not do this. It is a rare gift, one that can lead to great things. To reach those peaks, though, you must make sure you take care of everyone around you.
There is more I wish I could tell you. About friends you will meet along the way. About experiences you wouldn’t believe if I told you. About an entire world that you can’t even begin to fathom. One that has more depth and beauty and pleasure than you could ever imagine. One that is also callous and ugly and painful.
But that is your world to discover.
Which brings us to one last thing. You will experience that world however you chose. Always remember: the world doesn’t change. Only our perceptions do. That’s all you really have that is yours.
Use it wisely my friend.
Yours,
BK
