Trading the ideal for the real

🎶 We will be ripe in our time 🎶

“Don’t you have any happy songs?” I complain to Jesse. He is playing songs he wrote on his guitar, and I am tired of crying. 

He responds by playing “Toward the Sun.” While I still cry, I love it so much that when we are apart I demand he send me a recording of it. I spend the next four weeks tirelessly animating a music video for it. 

Frame-by-frame animation, it turns out, is slow and laborious. The animation in my mind is exquisite, but what I can pull off is clunky and childish. My enthusiasm dwindles. I leave it half-finished. 

no birds were harmed in the making of this animation

When you have an idea for something, the idea is exciting and perfect. It is untouched by the constraints of reality. You see only the finished project. Your mind glosses over the labor it will take to bring it to form.

I get excited about a new project: designing our house. I spend months perfecting the layout, squeezing our needs into a tiny 512-square footprint. I see it in my mind’s eye so clearly, the view of the trees from the big windows on the south side. 

The first day of construction arrives. My job is to cart nineteen sixty-pound bags of concrete through the woods to our house site and split them open. 

This is when reality sets in. I balk at the weight, the heft, the tiresome labor. My negative mental chatter turns into a yell. I think about how nice it was when I was nomadic, traveling around affordable countries, eating out at every meal, and spending all my time on the screen, in the land of ideas, barely lifting a finger. 

But the downside of that life, that state of pristine optionality, is its shallowness. Don’t like the weather? Fly somewhere else. Feeling lonely? Go to the festival and meet some people. Don’t feel like finishing that project? It wasn’t meant to be. Everything is surface novelty and nothing is substance.

What is the difference between going one step on a thousand journeys and going a thousand steps on one journey?

I finish carting the concrete and we fill the first piers of the house foundation. Airbnb reservations inevitably end, but this concrete seems like it will stick around.

I feel the satisfaction of having accomplished something small but real. 

I pick up the animation again because I had committed to Give Your Gift to finish it. The song itself is about maturation: “We will be ripe in our time,” the chorus promises. 

And bit by bit, as I trade ideal potentials for hard-won imperfect realities, I feel I am maturing. 

I finish the animation. It is not as I dreamed it would be, but it is. 

And now I can show it to you: