Turning Anew (or The Bum Life)

        “What are you doing now?” they ask you. You shrug and say, good-naturedly, “Nothing in particular. I’m a bum.” They raise their eyebrows in good-natured incredulity, but when they see the truth in your insistent smile, they just smile back and move on.

            Sometimes, they probe deeper and ask you why. You answer that you just feel like it, unbelievable as it may seem to them. And that’s that.

          This has been your life for seven months now. A life that has the tinge of excitement into it – the excitement of not knowing where you’ll be at the end of the day, of not following a To-do list, of doing just whatever it is you feel like doing. And for the first time, it’s you who’s on the steering wheel.

            Even now, seven months into the bargain, this life has not lost its thrill for you. The boxes of books that have been waiting for you are now humored – in fact, they are your new chums. You see the world anew – without all the hurry, without the preoccupations, with all the time in the world. And why not? You deserve this after all. There’s no guilt there whatsoever.

            So imagine, for a moment, that you chose a path other than this. That you are now as successful as the others, that every morning you hurry to your office or your classroom to start the day ahead instead of that other life where every morning you will only be heading to sleep, having been up all night to watch the silent, enduring stars, or wonder at how the moon could change and its mystery stay the same, or have your fourth cup of coffee while typing away at your laptop. That while your former carefree friends are talking about job interviews and salaries, you join the conversation with a few anecdotes of your own, instead of only listening and thinking of how you’re going to get the next raket to tide your expenses. Because you realize that the bum life is not bountiful. But you say it doesn’t matter, because you shall get something from it, something you need to deal with all the noise later.

            But. When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing?, it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity, good or bad. The devout hope is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it… if he were making a fortune and a name, so much better for him; if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative. So says Clym Yeobright in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. How very fitting that you should read it at this time of your life.

            Because you know yourself that you want to be like your former classmates who are so sure of where they are going, who tread a straight path and do not veer away from it. Because beneath the excitement of your life, you know there is the ennui of knowing that tomorrow you walk the same uncertain path. And you want your life to turn just the way it did before, turning normally, turning regularly clockwise.

            But. Let’s say the gift you gave yourself is courage. To fathom your depths, testing how much they can hold. To live like most people outside your former world do, just plodding along, plodding forward, wherever that may be. To chuck the fear.

            Then, humbly I say to you, join me.