Where You Decide to Put Your Energy Determines Your Future

"Do you feel like life has passed you by?"

Speaking of streaming and all the ills of it, in preparation for the latest I Like to Watch podcast about my favorite film Brazil, I dove into some Terry Gilliam and re-watched 12 Monkeys. Love that film, too. Then I remembered how much I enjoyed the SYFY series inspired by the film and have spent much of my down time this week re-watching that series on Hulu.

The concept of time travel is always fascinating. From Avengers: Endgame to Marty McFly in Back to the Future the possibilities of going back and changing things are intoxicating like remembering the first time you had really good sex or a solid belt of seriously expensive whiskey. What would you change if you could splinter like James Cole into the past? Would you try right vast wrongs or whisper to yourself to invest in Apple? Does lived experienced affect these choices? Would a younger man change different things? Would an older man leave well enough alone but enjoy the view?

Would you go back and prevent the untimely death of a loved one? Go back and reverse course on a horrible relationship? Maybe go back and not burn that bridge? Knowing that in all time travel stories, a change in things has a ripple effect, what would you be willing to change with the possibility that it would change everything or nothing but you wouldn’t know because time does not flow around us like water around a stone.

As one grows older, the ratio of energy to that which the energy is invested becomes that of diminishing returns. That's how age works. The energy level is reduced and the result must be to likewise be more discriminating in what one uses that now finite resource.

A man in his younger days can throw himself 150% into finding a partner. He can find one, lose one, find another, lose that one, find a third, she finds a host of partners for cash. By that time, the man's energy to then pursue a fourth is tapped. This is not to say that he won't find that unicorn fourth partner but that he has less gumption to activate a pursuit and must be even more discerning on whom he pursues. There just isn't the gas to fuel the engine.

He put a lot of his energy in service of finding love and his choices were as frivolous as the young man who buys a cool but less than pragmatic car and wrecks it. Likely the next car purchased will be less adventurous and less expensive. By the time that vehicle becomes a seriously used car and must be sold for parts, he is in that dangerous mid-life territory and he goes all in with a rag-top Camaro with spinning rims and ridiculous horsepower. He now shops at CarMax for a Prius because the fun choices have bled him dry.

A man in his younger days can barrel into any job with the abandon of someone looking to prove himself. He uses that seemingly infinite supply of energy making himself indispensable, innovating, pushing to climb the ladder of success. He hustles. He battles the forces of mediocrity like a knight on a quest. When he is suddenly tossed aside because management just wants a worker not a firebrand, the fact that he is more Quixote than Galahad doesn't even occur to him. He launches into the next gig with a vengeance, investing his every waking moment slaying the imagined dragons of the institutional body politic. The company uses him and then opts for someone less problematic. By the time he gets hired by yet another company looking for his creativity but is met with the exact same mediocrity and lack of imagination, he has learned that companies never love him, so why does he give them his every ounce of industry?

He chooses to invest his now limited energy more cautiously. He uses his energy to pursue those things that provide benefit to himself and to those whom he loves. He looks back at those moments when he threw himself into passions that promised little in terms of financial gain but huge dividends in his own growth as a human being. He gazes into his past, not to dwell upon 'the good old days' because those days are always ahead of him, but to find those challenges that made him feel fulfilled and solid and with purpose.

They almost always included some sort of artistic measure. So, like James Cole, he splinters.

He sees himself improvising onstage. He watches a play he directed in the theater he co-founded. He has a drink of beer and enjoys the sight and sounds of his hosting a storyslam. He buys a copy of his own book at a reading in a bookstore. He blasts a jazzy solo from the perch of the trumpet section of a big band hailing from the south side of Chicago.

He also revisits the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Blues Fest at Millennium Park, a production of Klown in a storefront theater. Because it’s a time machine, he goes back to see his friends and family before they were his friends and family, a voyeur to their seminal moments, to see who they were before he was in the picture. He finds and views those adventures the crew he belongs to embarked on not knowing they would be significant.

"Do you feel like life has passed you by?"

My dad asked me this question as my niece was telling us all about her fresh new start into a killer job she was thrilled to be in the running to get.

"No. Not at all," I replied, a bit confused by the query. I feel like I’ve lived a good life, an exciting life. I’ve loved and lost more than many, I’ve been all over the world, I’ve performed in the largest cities in the world. Sure, I’ve lived check-to-check for my entire adult life but that’s the price you pay to live a weird life. Whatever one can say about my journey through time, it sure hasn’t been boring.

And there it is, gang. The nougat at the center of the chocolate. If I could splinter back in time I wouldn't change a thing. I've lived a remarkable life so far with more to come. I have more art to create and to enjoy. I have more time with my family and I genuinely have enjoyed the ride thus far. Your future is determined where you put that dwindling energy rather than the host of choices you wish you hadn't made.

Anyway, you should check out 12 Monkeys. It's damn fun and you get to see Todd Stashwick shirtless.