After living all his life in essentially one place -- although it is a big city -- he has apparently decided to move 1,200 miles away and get a fresh start in life.
He is 30 years old. When I was 30, I felt old as death, but from the perspective of 33 more years, I think I was actually pretty young. He has a good education -- a graduate degree -- and has yet to start a family of his own.
He is bright, outgoing and talented, but the fields he has been pursuing have been changing rapidly. He has seen the struggles of men of his father's generation and it would certainly be understandable if he wanted to step away from the table and take some time to think.
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| 24 years ago. |
I have known him since before his third birthday, and I figure he's about the second-best young man of his generation that I know. (I'm not rating anyone ahead of my son, but I love this kid and would do whatever I could to help him)
He wants to be a writer, but for every big success in that field, there are a dozen who just get by and a hundred more who don't make it at all. If I could give him any advice at all about that, I would tell him to make a mark for himself writing non-fiction first. Magazine articles, biographies, that sort of thing. Those are things for which there is still a market and you don't have to compete with the thousand wannabes who are trying to write the next big science-fiction movie.
In his move, he is doing something I did many times during my career -- picking up stakes and going somewhere entirely different for a fresh start. I always had jobs waiting for me when I moved, but he has friends and a place to stay waiting for him.
Leaving a place you have lived for a long time can be a mixed bag, and many people tend to expect too much of it. They think all their problems will be left behind, and of course that isn't true. Because whenever you move, no matter how far you go, the one thing you can never leave behind is yourself.
I got that line from a movie I never actually saw -- "Buckaroo Banzai in the Eighth Dimension" -- and what it actually said was, "Wherever you go, there you are." During the years I was a newspaper columnist, I was called upon several times to give speeches to 18-year-olds who were getting awards. What I eventually got from it was that yes, you don't leave your problems behind, but you also carry your strengths along with you.
You have the love of your parents and your sisters, your friends and acquaintances. You have what you have been taught and what you have learned. And if there's one thing I can leave you with, maybe it's this:
Remember Jay Gatsby, of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald said he paid a very high price for living so long with the same dream.
Dreams come and go. If one good thing doesn't happen, something else will as long as you keep faith with yourself.
Best of luck, kiddo.
You'll be fine.
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