Dear
Philip,
I have to take issue with your response to
the woman who wanted to quit her job and move to California to pursue her dream
of acting. She is young and single, and
if she doesn’t reach for the thing she has always wanted to do now, when will
she? If she does what you suggest, she
may wake up one day and feel a lot of regret.
You usually give great advice, but when you
told her to stay put, you blew it. Carpe diem!
Faith (as in, “You’ve got to have”)
Dear Faith,
One of my older
brothers called home from college – oh, back when Carter was in office – to ask
the folks a question. Here’s the short
version of that conversation:
Brother: Dad, can I go skydiving with my
friends?
Dad:
It’s ‘may’ I go skydiving, and no.
I remember
cheekily wondering aloud why my brother bothered asking for permission. Considering he was a thousand miles from
home, how would my parents ever have found out, short of a coroner’s
report? My pop’s reply: “Because he
doesn’t want to go skydiving.”
One of the best
lessons a parent can teach a budding advice columnist is this: Often what a person really wants to know and
what they’re asking you aren’t the same things.
Sometimes it’s a
boy sitting with his college buddies, letting his parents put the kibosh on
skydiving so he doesn’t have to let on that he’s a little afraid to jump out of
a plane. Sometimes it’s a 26-year-old
woman who hates her job, looking for someone to put the brakes on her
half-baked escape plan before she trades one lousy situation for another.
You’re not alone
in disagreeing with me for telling ‘Ready to Take a Chance’ that she ought to
concentrate on more realistic goals than her dream of being a television star, Faith. I heard from several folks who’ve decided I
don’t have a romantic bone in my body; my friend Andrea even ended her Facebook
comment on the column with the Dead Poets
Society cry of “Carpe Diem!” just like you.
A passion, you all agree, must be followed.
Which is why it’s
a shame that Ready clearly doesn’t have one.
Some folks read her letter, saw the words “I have always dreamed” and
didn’t see much else. Like the long
qualifier: “A friend told me I should figure out what I really want to do...” Or the words that came after “dreamed;”
namely “…of being on television.” We’ll get to the latter in a moment, but
first a quick question: On a scale of
day-old coals to raging inferno, how burning can your desire be, if you need a
friend to tell you to “figure out” what you’ve always wanted to do?
That’s not a small
point, and I’m convinced that’s why Ready included it in her letter: even she
knew that she was manufacturing an escape fantasy so she didn’t have to try to
fix the situation she was in. I’m all for clean breaks; I’m just not a fan of
poor planning. Ready needs a plan.
And let’s be
clear: “being on television” is neither a plan nor a practicable dream. Acting – which you mistakenly quoted as
Ready’s dream – is a path. You take
classes, you go on auditions, you take whatever crummy roles you can get, you
learn, you go on more auditions. Actors
will tell you it’s a craft, and that it’s a life-long pursuit. Dreaming about being on television? That’s not about honing a craft, that’s how a
child says, “I want to be famous.” It’s
a lovely (childish) dream, but it’s neither a career nor a path.
If you’re still
not convinced that Ready was looking for someone to tell her to buck up and fix
her life instead of running away from it, I humbly offer you two last
questions, Faith: Why would anyone
burning with a real passion bother writing to their local advice columnist to
ask if they should follow it? And what
kind of passion would let them listen if he said no?
Yours in seizing
the day…thoughtfully,
Philip
