A Hopeful Plea

My face hit the floor and it was at that moment that I realized I had jaded. Is that a reversible fate? “Once jaded, always jaded.” I think I read that somewhere – although I’m not quite sure as to what in or whom by. Prior to that point, I had grandiose dreams of graduating college, attending graduate school and making it. I wanted to make it. And now the thought of making it just makes me sick. Perhaps that is what made me so sickly in the first place – trying to make it.

Phase one in the glorious American dream – college graduate. Done; as to how successfully, though, is quite the point of personal contention. And now all I have to show for it is a degree and the fact that all my passions have become juxtaposed by stark generalized rules. Vague feelings of content have replaced passion; and passion has disappeared. Or perhaps passion has just migrated to other realms due to newly occupied feelings of boredom and apathy towards previous passions. I can assert, after obtaining a music degree, that a degree of higher learning only serves to replace enjoyment with misery in a person’s passion.

In hindsight, shouldn’t I be referring to myself not as I, but as ‘one’ – a non-descript clay model meant to represent myself, or all the rest of humanity. But I am not the rest of humanity, I am me. Why should I ascribe myself to this set of rules that turns an individual, such as myself, into something that is just a mundane, faceless, overly generalized representation of society. Am I ranting? Do the rules allow that?

Now, I am that college graduate, but with less than grandiose dreams. I am still jaded, though. I guess what I heard, wherever it was that I heard it, was correct. Jadedness is a ramp or hill or incline that, at times, may even itself out a bit; but it never seems to reverse the direction of incline. Once a person takes that first step off the even concrete into the realm of jadedness, that person just keeps rolling.

I guess becoming jaded hasn’t been all that bad, though. With jadedness comes honesty – or it seems that way. One becomes jaded by being exposed to many different things. Fortunately this also leads to an elevated sense of knowledge and honesty. But, the ultimate deliberation is whether an elevated sense of knowledge, truth, and honesty is worth the heavy heart, of sorts, that comes along with it.

It seems that the more I know about the world, the more it gets me feeling older and less hopeful. But that wisdom also breeds a more highly refined sense of hope. I know more about the bad that exists in the world, but through this can also see the holes in the world that are just waiting to be filled by good passionate well-meaning people, things, ideas, etc.
I’ve grown older, I’ve grown more experienced, and I’ve grown exceedingly more jaded since the days I looked forward to that grandiose future. But I’ve also grown wiser, more informed, and bigger as a person. Naivety was bliss, but knowing allows for change. Change, in turn, then allows for innocence to blossom hand-in-hand with knowledge. We can have a future of hope defined not by jaded experience, but by knowledge, goodness, and passion.

So, standing up with the realization of my now jaded nature, I decided that my bruises and scars from the past would not be battle wounds but pleas for advancement. From that day forth, my injuries were utilized to spread the message clearly: “Go forth – be good; do good.” And most importantly, “expose yourself to as much as possible, and take all the best out of everything you encounter.”

I can do better; you can do better; we can do better – I have hope. I have a hope. I have that hope.