A Journal of Restlessness

So, what is this crisis? "The Present Crisis"? I've asked my friends, quarter-lifers, themselves. They all have a variety of opinions: no great war to define our generation, the call to dream -- hell, I've even heard Sesame Street is to blame, or the Neighborhood of Make-Believe! I asked half-lifers and three-quarter lifers, and truly, they don't understand. Our paradigms are our own. Perhaps this is why I wasn't ravenous to read Brokaw's The Greatest Generation.

What is it objectively? I'll have to leave that to the psychologists of the world. I can only speak for myself, and in that, hopefully, I'll speak for my generation.

Since I've been very, very young, I've been drawn up and spit out by the sound of train whistles. They've a haunting kind of resonance. All the more because I don't see the source. It's a sound of movement. More than that, though, its moving sound reminds me that I'm still. And when the last whisps of the Doplar effect pass me by, I'm aware that the train has moved on and I have not.

This is my feeling of the Quarter life. It's a crisis, for me, of missing out. Where have the trains gone? Is it someplace better? Someplace more fitting, more exciting? And so, for me, I'm haunted by these several dreams that I could be living. You see, some people have called the Quarter Life Crisis a problem of anxiety over living their dreams. This is not my problem. It's not a problem of grasping a dream, but of choosing which dream to grasp.

When, by luck, you do happen to live your dream, often you discover that the reality has replaced the dream and you're left with the unchosen dreams still buzzing around in your mind. For me, I've been moving from dream to dream -- and for this I call myself lucky -- but mostly I'm just restless.

We were told to follow our dreams, and for people like me who don't automatically distrust my elders, this seemed like a satisfying goal. Following your dreams was itself an ideal because only the minority ever did it. What happens if the majority of a generation does this? Paradise? Or perhaps were allowed to see, with greater clarity, the consequences of dreaming. That is, the difficulty, the danger, and the daydream.

Dreaming is an auspicious power. Perhaps even the fundamental power and grace of mankind: the way in which God speaks to us. For this reason, it is not to be taken lightly. For myself, I've found that dreams can quickly turn to temptations if not tempered by forces such as prayer.

Can we be too trustful of a dream? Who ever declared for us that dreams were not incorruptible as much as they were not impossible? I think this is the beginning of my crisis.