The Penguins Call
Or is it the Amazon?
I was listening to a You Tube interview with James Taylor about what made his friend, John Lennon, so special and JT said John was constantly reinventing himself and that he refused to stay in a box even though the suits wanted him to just keep making Beatles music and it probably cost him a lot of money. It got me to thinking about reinventing myself which I think is a very invigorating idea and I have an idea that I will be a mentor for people with developmental disabilities, something that I think that I would be very good at because I believe that everyone has a lot to offer and people with developmental disabilities are often much less concerned with how they may look or sound and that can prove to be very refreshing and very disarming and being a mentor would be very beneficial for the people I mentor and just as edifying for me, maybe even more so. Artists have to keep reinventing themselves or their art gets stale, they get bored and suddenly they aren’t artists any more but rather are more like dead, inanimate objects and people who aren’t artists are the same, if you stop looking around, stop opening your eyes to new things, you are in great danger of getting stale, rotting on the vine and you will start to smell badly like a rotten tomato.
I think reinvention is important for everyone, even people who think they are perfectly content with their lives because you never know if things couldn’t be more gratifying if you don’t shake things up and try. You just may find a hidden ability that suddenly ignites a fire under you and brings your life to a new level, making living once more amazing and livable. Fear is probably the main reason that people don’t go the reinvention route, fear that they will fail and that being frozen is better than failing but the problem is you just might die frozen or die from the cold. We also delay reinventions because we feel there may be nothing better out there and then the feeling of being out of control and lost sets in, two very scary states of mind that are often to be avoided at all costs, even at the expense of joy. For sure, most of us learn from an early age that we shouldn’t be explorers and that we should stay on the safe road and not venture out and possibly fall off a cliff and die.
I watched a wonderful program on NetFlix called “Atypical” and I urge you all to check it out. It is a series about Sam Gardner, an 18-year-old boy on the autism spectrum who is totally fascinated with penguins and begins to plan a trip to Antarctica to see the penguins. I envy Sam because he is so focused on his dream and will see it to its success, somehow, and Sam has few of the barriers that typical people have, barriers that can be like mile high stone walls that keep you from going after something new, exciting and even dangerous and the words “that’s impossible” aren’t in Sam’s vocabulary. People like Sam simply don’t listen to reason and really reason is usually unreasonable and is just fear in disguise. The Sams of the world don’t have filters like the rest of us, they are more free to dream because they haven’t learned to filter out adventure from their lives. Life without filters must be daunting at times and confusing but it is certain that if Sam had more filters, he wouldn’t be planning to study penguins in Antarctica.
Reinvention need not be as radical as traveling to Antarctica even though that does sound really exciting and stimulating and cold. Maybe it’s an open-ended excursion to the Amazon rain forest or getting a job on a cruise ship. It could be getting a job as a bus driver and getting to meet all the people who are always coming and going or it could be working on the boardwalk in Asbury Park and getting to know all the vendors or maybe training to be a sherpa, although that may take more training than you are willing to commit and most sherpas tend to be from Nepal. And even if your reinvented self finds that the change has not set your world on fire you can reinvent again until you find a niche. No matter what they say, there is no limit to reinventions other than your own fears and the insecurities that have been lodged into your brain. Reinvention is the best way I know of to free the artist hidden inside you and letting it breathe and flourish.
People think they are defined not by who they are but what they do and that is just more of the brainwashing to keep most of us at some moderate level akin to not tipping the boat and causing everybody to fall in ocean.
Think about those who reached high and what would have happened if they hadn’t reached out. Einstein probably wouldn’t have come up with the theory of relativity if he was too fearful that he would fail and wasn’t smart enough. Moby Dick would never have been written if Herman Melville listened to the dozens of naysayers at publishing companies who said nobody wants to read about whales. There was a pitcher, Jim Abbott, who had one arm who made it to the Major Leagues and even tossed a no-hitter for the Yankees and I guarantee you that he would have amounted to nothing special if he had listened to those who told him that one-armed guys don’t make it to the Yankees and that going beyond his disability was impossible. And probably Jim Abbott feels he has really accomplished something special and probably went on to other special things after he left baseball.