Youthful Musings

When I was seventeen I thought loneliness was the prize you paid for creativity. It was okay to be estranged from the world if out of that separation a story grew. And it was okay to feel the painful absence that came from longing for something powerfully beyond my reach if poetry could rise from that same place. Now, nearing sixty, I do what I can to fend off loneliness and seek to create instead as a member of a community responsible for other members.But I wonder sometimes if I did not lose something necessary in this life-long journey from self to other. It was certainly painful, that youthful angst. But there was also that sense that I was digging, uncovering, deepening. There was separation and isolation and vain pride at being different. Yes, all that. But there was also this crazy sense of sticking stubbornly to the path you were discovering, the road not taken. If I could join that seventeen-year-old and the sixty-year-old, I would keep the sense of being special and throw out the sense of being better. I would be unique and I would be like everybody else. I would keep the longing for some unknown other in the midst of my belonging to all others. If I could take something from that seventeen-year-old boy and infuse it into these old arms, it would be this: his fear of being shallow and trivial, of wasting life; his courage to face loneliness rather than be who he was not; the passionate sense that he was preparing, becoming, learning, getting ready for his appointed task.