I went Wednesday for a hearing exam that established what Carol and I have known for a year or two: I have an aging hearing loss and need a hearing aid.
I happen to be listening to Dave Albin singing, “Everett Ruess” which includes the line, “You give up your dreams as you get older, but I never gave up mine.”
‘Dreams’ seems too vague and romantic.
I never had ‘’dreams’. I had purpose and plans.
If those dreams are of the sea, waves will rise and smack you cold in the face, as they have me a thousand times.
Picture a solitary child, sitting in his bedroom, looking out over an overgrown field in the middle of a continent, longing for the thousand mile distant ocean.
He reached that ocean, of which there is but one as the ancients knew, and he sailed and knew it as few others ever have.
He grew older than he ever imaged he would.
“Almost dying is a hard way to make a living,” he wrote after almost dying every year for two decades; but even at a deafening and half blind seventy-five years he never gave up not his dreams, which he was too hard minded ever to have had, but his certainty that he was an original, fully aware that almost all original experiments are failures.
He continued to live his life in uncertainly and risk, as all of us do, not knowing if his life was a success or a failure, or even how to define those terms.
He continued to live his life in uncertainly and risk, as all of us do, not knowing if his life was a success or a failure, or even how to define those terms.