Off-Season

In the times we want to fix everything, sometimes everything falls apart.

The pieces we pick back up are the important ones.

Stability

This is mostly all I’ve ever wanted. I’ve worked very hard, so I’ve thought, to secure this for myself. But now, finding stability meant jumping ship. Some of it is the state of this country, and some of this is very personal, but everything pushed me away from America.

(I write pieces like these to come back to someday, when I’ve made something of myself more than I already have).

I’m not sure how different I am than everyone else. I’m not sure how many other young people crave stability above all else. Maybe a lot of us just don’t recognize the need for it yet, or don’t say it if we do. Maybe it’s too hard to say something out loud that we want, but don’t feel like we have and don’t know how long it’ll be until we can have it. Maybe stability is like that.

What do I mean by stability? A place to live that’s safe and comfortable, that specifically will never turn on you and cast you out for any humane reason. A place that if you’re kind, and are looking out for it, it will be kind to you. A foundation for the rest of your life’s work.

Travel

This is something much easier to obtain than stability, especially with housing being a luxury nowadays.

Growing up with less-than-disposable income, it seemed like a luxury that was only possible once you figured out how to have stability. My family was busy enough keeping up with the stability part. I was born traveling, though, on the opposite coast of America from my extended family. When we moved back, the stagnation that lasted a whole childhood felt tough.

And then like many young people, I hit 18 and did as much traveling as I possibly could, but it felt like more to me. I returned to the same coast I was born on, and the world finally opened up again.

I take travel as a means to cope with an unhappy day-to-day life for a lot of us. The memories of something better getting us through the tough times. But this is not what my life to be written like. In my life’s work, I am to make the actual places we spend our lives habitable in ways we sometimes forget was even possible, which leads into this:

Biodiversity

This is something we all forget. I don’t care who you are, you have forgotten.

Why?

Because it happens both slowly enough, and more importantly out of view enough, that we can’t even remember what it meant.

The best way I can describe what we have lost, is to watch the movie Ponyo, and realize that the feeling of the world being full of all those little sea creatures was what we actually, in real life, once had. Not the prehistoric ones shown, not the magical ones either, but a million different types of colorful and distinct forms of life? Yes, we had that. We can have that again.

Remember when you were a kid, and there seemed to be more bugs on your windshield every summer?

Remember when you were younger, and there were more animals visiting your house in the suburbs that your parents called pests? More bugs?

Remember fireflies? Remember them?

I grew up visiting the city and the country, but I lived in the suburbs. The suburbs had the least amount of life by far. I’m absolutely not cool with how cool everyone who lives in the suburban hellscapes we’ve created just responds to every other life form by fucking killing it. I’m pissed, and so extremely disappointed in this aspect of our species. It’s childish, trashy and destructive, and heartless above all else. Disgusting.

Nothing magical ever happens in the suburbs. But magic was alive and well in the country and even the city. We should have never decided that everyone deserves a little piece of the country (a little suburban land plot). We should have kept our cities the way we had them. We wouldn’t have killed so much of what we had, had we kept things as they were. The city and the country as two separate beasts. We shouldn’t have given everyone what they wanted: to be kings of their own little plot of paradise. I guess this problem goes back to consumerism itself, then. Corporations and the American government over the last couple hundred years catering to what some young demographic would want in their wildest dreams. Or whatever. I say young, but everyone who buys into this nonsense acts like children, so… let’s just say “young at heart”.

Nostalgia

In my head it goes without saying, but I’ll say it here anyway, that what we crave (the pieces missing from our lives), the world in the past really did have. And we know that, even if most of us can’t pinpoint why. We watch period pieces, read historical fiction or creatively-interpreted non-fiction, dream about the past. Nostalgia is all we ever dream about in this country anymore. Nothing seems to be bright going forward anymore. We just can’t seem to understand how literal this feeling is, and how solvable. Above all, this condition is solvable. We can build something better than what the past had. There are still goals to fulfill in this life, even if the goal is just living. I know I will be working towards it.

Dreams and Goals of Today

These are things I want to do one day, in no particular order.

Open a nature preserve of my own.

Do my part in building up a certain city to be more livable and exciting, for the sole purpose of enticing people away from the unhealthy-for-everyone (human, animal, nature and planet) suburbs.

Do my part in maintaining biodiversity in the world. Some of my favorite creatures are birds and white rhinos, so I give money in different ways for them.

I am also continuing to find my stronger voice, so I can speak on the things that are important to me.

Conclusion – Pieces Picked Up

Stability, travel, biodiversity, and nostalgia (remembering how things in the natural world used to be) seem to be the most of what I want to bring along as baggage anymore. I’ve been trying to downsize, even in my head. I think this package of four is a very good start.