A Diet of Dreams

I just saw the film “Into the Wild.” It is a different perspective from Krakauer's brilliant biography of Christopher “Alexander” McCandless, but it's telling of the brief enigmatic life of McCandless is no less profound in it's effect on me. It is the story of a life I could nearly have chosen. I highly recommend both the book and film. I have included the response I wrote in my gridbook journal after I first read the book in 2003:




I finished "Into The Wild." Who cannot love this reckless young man? What older man cannot read this and see his own self in younger dreamier days? Chris McCandless lived out so many of my boyish fantasies. How many times have I looked longingly into a forest or a mountain range and thought "What if I just left the road and walked out into that?" I read and recall myself running a tiny path through the woods in the heart of a violent storm hearing the ancient trees crashing across the path behind me—exhilarated and feeling more alive than ever. I remember myself wandering the remote mountain villages in Haiti with nothing but a water bottle and a camera.

I recollect hearing Alexander often spoken or even sung about by friends in college; he had already become a sort of patron saint for young men like us. I got out my old CD of songs from college which mentioned McCandless. Listening to Tom singing years ago on these recordings always is emotional for me—relics of a world that no longer exists for me, a world that shaped me. I recall the nights in the cabin beside the fire with other wild-hearted young men singing songs, reading each other our melodramatic poems. We all had bigger dreams and bigger ideas then: meeting before sunrise to sing prayers in the form of Gregorian Chants, because ancient monks had purer hearts than we ...playing soccer naked at midnight after butchering and cooking our own pig ...reading books by men long dead ...growing long beards ...sleeping in abandoned garages and cotton fields as we wandered the back highways without a map ...walking barefoot and reading books in trees.

We didn't take things as far as Alexander. We were mostly normal college students who usually slept in beds, flirted with girls, and ate processed foods, but we all had a piece of ourself in another world. When we wanted we could partake in the food of saints and dreamers. Now as an older man I am exclusively a man of the "real world." Alexander turned his back on the "real world" and lived exclusively on a diet of dreams far more vigorous than our occasional tastes, and he died of starvation in his sleeping bag. Who cannot envy this arrogant, foolish boy who never sold out?

My days of risks are over. I have a wife now, I will not run in a hurricane or wander uncharted villages alone again. These minor risks were appropriate for a young man, but now my wife is my priority and I must act responsibly. I am proud to be her husband and would never trade her for any one of McCandless' freedoms. I will soon have patients that depend on me for their life and health, and this will also be good. The ties that bind us are good. There can be virtue in this world too. One of those virtues is discipline. I have a huge test soon, and I have spent an entire day in this book and these sentimental musings. These are things I cannot do. Too many people are trusting me.

I leave this now to try to refocus myself on the work that has been set out for me. As I go I say a silent prayer for Jade and Fernando–the last two among us to live so exclusively on a diet of wild dreams–wherever in the world they might be . I could imagine either of them turning up dead on an adventure even more beautiful and foolish than Alexander's, but I pray that they are safe, as I also earnestly pray that they are doing nothing so banal as my work today, that they never give up that which I have chosen to leave behind. Somehow knowing that they are out there living these dreams makes my own burdens feel lighter.

Changing Decades

Reflections from my journal. The two pictures are ten years apart.

I turn 30 tomorrow. While I am certainly not old yet, I am no longer young. I know that it sounds odd, but this change of decades has caught me by surprise. I didn't really see myself as older, in fact my idea of myself hasn't changed much in the last decade. While the decade from ten to twenty contains necessary change from child to adult, this next decade was more like the simple passage of days that suddenly added up to another decade without being aware of aging. While I have certainly had new experiences and learned new things, I am psychologically, physically, and mentally not very different from that twenty year old—not enough to feel ten years older. This combined with the rapid gestation of our first child, and my first real job as an independent MD, has created a sense of suddenly finding myself much older.

Perhaps it is due to a culture that glorifies youth and fears aging, but I had really grown attached to my idea of myself as a “young man.” Being a young adult allows one to be idealistic, hold strange ideas, and act eccentrically, write fiction, and wear worn and torn clothes—all acceptable and expected in young men, but a bit silly for a grown man. And what is one to do about this surprising loss of youth? Nothing is more pitiful than an adult who tries to seem young by dressing or talking like young people. I must accept that I am no longer young and attempt aging with grace—realizing that 40, 50, 60, etc. will likely overtake me with similar stealth.

These sorts of thoughts make me question how I have used my time. While based on average life expectancies I still have over half my life ahead of me and I am hopefully still far from the stage of unavoidable physical and mental decline, I have passed the freest of decades now. As a father and practicing physician much of my time from now will not be my own.

Myself as a twenty-year-old would have expected to do more over this decade. I would have expected at this point to have done more to make the world better, to have written some important book, and to have a deeper relationship with God. Instead I find myself with a job, a mortgage, accumulating things I don't need, thinking more about my own desires and comfort than about what is right and true.

There is good reason to stop and reflect at thirty. Too often ideals and hopes fade as we age. The Baby Boomers were right to not trust anyone over thirty—look how sold out and self-absorbed they became as they aged! Aging is inevitable as long as life goes on. I can only hope that the apathy, atrophy, and closed-mindedness won't be necessary side effects of becoming older.

When Dreams Become Responsibilities

The last few weeks I've been having the same dream: I am working in the Emergency Room surrounded by patients I can't cure with problems I can't even understand. In the bizarre logic of dreams, my patients seem both real and somehow blurry enough that their illnesses never make sense. These dreams last all night. I awaken, realize I have been dreaming, but cannot shake off the anxieties of the dream; “What would I do if that really happened at the hospital?” (Unable to realize that dreams present problems to which there are no solutions.) I fall back into fitful sleep. My wife says I talk frantically in my sleep. These dreams only come on nights before my shifts at the hospital.

It is interesting that I once would have said it is my “dream” to be a doctor. Although I love my job, my former dreamy idealism has been replaced with heavy duty. Before in residency, I was in a group of many training doctors and was never the one finally responsible for the care I gave. Now as I work 24 hour shifts in this rural Emergency Room, I alone am responsible for the life and safety of every person who enters the doors.

Fortunately in my waking work, even my patients with complex problems eventually make sense to me, and I believe the care I provide really is quite good. People I know occasionally bemoan not reaching ambitious goals they set for themselves. My daydreams are the opposite: I think how nice it might have been if I hadn't passed my medical school entrance exams. I could work a regular job without weary nights, death, suffering, and weighty responsibility. My brother recently left nursing school. He told me, “I like working with people, but if I give the wrong medicine someone might die. I don't think I want a job like that.” A few years ago I would have tried to talk him out of this. Not now.

My wife reminds me that I had similar dreams during my first year of residency. I grew out of them, as I became more confident in my new role. Hopefully I will also grow stronger under the burden of this dream I have chosen for myself—strong enough to carry it's weight with grace and patience.

The Ownership of Things

Returning to the present day:

I bought a new car, the first new car I have ever owned. The old white rattle-trap was becoming unreliable. With so much long-distance driving these days I decided to buy a cheap, reliable, fuel-efficient new car. It is all those things, and it is also fun to drive.

The fact that I like my new black car is concerning. I never really liked the old white car; it was just a functional thing that got me from place to place. During this phase of my life in which I am often alone I find myself becoming attached to things. The fact that my new car fits my values of thrift and environmentalism only increases my sense of attachment.

I was told when I was younger, "Always care about people and use things, not vice-versa." I recall the Sisters of Charity I admired in Haiti. Their cheap flip-flops were the only things they owned in the entire world. They walked freely and joyfully in places where someone with a nice car and a wallet full of credit cards could never have been. Similarly there are places the old white junker could take me that my new black car doesn't go so comfortably. The beat up white car could be left in front of a homeless shelter or driven up these winding Tennessee hollers without the awkwardness that a shiny new car creates.

The fact is that the ownership of nice things isolates one from others. There are certain considerations you must take for your property, that makes you lonelier than before. It seems to me that extreme wealth must be the saddest place a person can be.

As a young and idealistic student, poverty was easy to achieve. Now an idealist with a family and responsibilities I find certain nice things seem unavoidable. I tell myself that these things are still tools I will use to do what I am called to do. But I cannot help but wonder if years from now I might find myself safe behind locked doors fretting over protecting my property from the very ones I had hoped to serve.