Lando that Tried

I had a really productive conversation with one of my favorite people the other day. We talked about a lot of things, but the topic that most resonated with me is something I have struggled with for a long time now; The Dream and how to achieve it.

I guess I should define what I mean by “The Dream”. The Dream to me is the end goal; a labor of love; a career or path one chooses to find that elusive combination of fulfillment and joy; what one needs to achieve or become in order to truly exploit their potential. To some people, the Dream looks like being a successful attorney with a nice house, expensive car, job security, and enough money to never have to worry about it – I also find it curious that my chosen example was that of an attorney, a career path I have been increasingly contemptuous of following myself – To others the Dream looks like being a struggling artist until they are discovered and then compensated for doing something they actually love to do. The Dream can be a house with a white picket fence, or a Labrador retriever, or taking a cruise every year.

I don’t think I ever really had a dream. I hear stories about successful people who, at an early age, realized they knew exactly what they wanted to be and then got on that path and walked it. Years in they find success, and if they don’t, they keep going until they do. Those people are hard to discourage because if one is working towards a dream and does so relentlessly despite how unrealistic or impractical it may seem, then the dream starts becoming more attainable after enough time and determination. Only those that do it actually get to live it; such a trite and simple and pernicious thought. I have not been one of those people. I currently find myself in the opposite end of the spectrum from those people. Not only am I not working towards my dream, until recently, I had not come to terms with the fact that I never chose one. For reasons too complicated to get into here, I sort of convinced myself that the expectations and dreams of my family were those of my own. So I followed them, haphazardly, languorously.

That is as much as I am willing to delve into that topic at this time. Not for difficulty of writing about it, I am too self-serving not to do so at some point, but rather because that is not the purpose of this entry.

The point is that here I found myself years after my college graduation, without a clear path before me, forever tentative and undecided. I credited my indetermination to simply not having found that one thing I was great at. But then again, I had not really been searching. I was sitting there, waiting for it to fall on my ahead like the apocryphal story of Newton and the apple. Life rarely works that way. I understand this intellectually, but in my comfort and complacency I have let time pass me by, time which could have been invested into following a dream. Any dream.

So now we are back to the where this piece started; that conversation with one of my favorite people, Rubens, one of my best friends in this case. He tells me that he made a deal of sorts with another of my best friends and favorite people (her name is Sol). The deal was that they gave each other a “two week challenge” to complete an artistic work. To be fair here, that is more of what I took it to mean. A deadline to finish something. A starting point for a path towards the Dream. For Rubens it was to make progress on a drawing he had been unmotivated to work on; his dream is to have a career in animation and he certainly does not lack the talent to make that dream come true.  For Sol, the challenge was to start and finish a writing piece; she is a much better writer than I could ever hope to be and it’s always been a dream of hers to make a career of it.

I should note that I am exasperated by my generation’s ‘challenge’ culture. Water challenge, tide pod challenge, Ice bucket challenge… Yuck. I know these challenged are often for charitable causes and self improvement and all sorts of good and productive things but… Yuck, just yuck. The oversaturation of the terminology alone is reason enough for me to scoff at the mention of any ‘challenge.’ But this one was marketed well, and I bit.

The way Rubens framed the “challenge” was what really stuck with me. To paraphrase, he asked me to think back at an alternate version of myself that diverged from the current timeline five years ago. Unlike me, that Lando said “fuck this lawyer shit, I clearly don’t want to do it, so let me try to do something I think I might actually enjoy”. That Lando decided that he might just pursue that pipe-dream of talking in public and making people laugh as a career. That Lando was terrible, but persistent. That Lando took a gamble and used the last five years to get better at that craft. Where is that Lando now? What is that Lando doing? Would he be doing stand up for small, local clubs for extra cash on the weekend? Would he have snatched a writing gig or garnered a large enough following to make it a full-time job? I don’t know, but I think of all the possible alternatives and they all seem better than never trying at all. And what if this Lando were to start now? Where would I be in five years? Would I be at the same place as that alternate dimension Lando? – The Lando that tried.

Somewhere inside me I knew this all along, but to hear it externalized by someone else gave it an impact I was honestly not expecting. So I started trying.

I still don’t know my path. I still don’t know what career will lead me to the Dream. I certainly haven’t gone ‘all in’ on the comedian thing. But at least now I started walking. I’ve done a couple of open mics where I exhibited my writing and comedy. I will write about those at some point too but I’ll summarize by saying that they went well enough to make me want to do more, a lot more, and I will. Hard to describe the thrill and excitement I felt on the stage, even harder to describe how much I liked it. It’s not a lot, but it’s something. It’s a step in the direction of a Dream. Is it “The Dream”? I don’t know yet. I guess we will see in five years.