We met an old friend recently. T has had a complicated life and is one of those well-intentioned people who end up breaking a lot of glass. He retains the sense of wonderment about life in his 60s and is young and hopeful in spirit. For those of us who have known him for a while, he reminds us of our naïve and foolish youth and we can only aspire to have some of what he has by when we are his age. We traded stories as we cooked and then had dinner.
Our lives are incomparably pedestrian compared to his so his stories are way more entertaining than ours - some could be tinged with a hint of tragedy but many are not. He seems to have expanded his circle of friends to include folks like himself who fell off the mainstream rails at some point and deviated so far that there was no path back to "normal". In a sense, I disappointed him by becoming way more boring than I had been a while back - settling for the tried and true, lacking daring and imagination.
Chatting with T late into the night, made me think of a movie I had watched a while back Same Kind of Different as Me. People are different in their own unique ways and we could be so wrapped up in the idea that we are somehow so different that we might as well be deviant from what is acceptable and normal, that it might become our reality. Once it does, we manage to put distance between ourselves and others who may feel different in their own ways. To T's great credit, he does not allow his being off the beaten track get in the way of staying in touch with people and cultivating new relationships. We are all better off for it - we learn from hin and perhaps he learns from us in return.
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