Those were the best days of my life

You are driving along and on the radio–do people still listen to the radio? Today you do–you hear Brian Adams, the Summer of 69.  It’s a song about that one golden stretch when you were young.  Those were the best years of my life. Simple but powerful.

So as usual let’s bury a normal and uncomplicated feeling under a heap of analysis.

In the song the singer and his friends grew up to live normal decent lives for the most part but they had that one stretch when the world was before them.  I think the normal response to this type of feeling is to see the normal decent life as a kind of failure. Nothing wrong with it at all, that is not the point, just that it’s a form of chickening out. You didn’t have the guts to go to Hollywood and fight your way to the top in a life of glamor and fame.

Let’s be a little over the top here. You never went to Alaska, learned simple wisdom while on a fishing vessel in the high cold seas, by vast daring acquired your own fleet of fishing vessels, used to them as a cover for gun running to an insurgency in Southeast Asia, abruptly gave away all of your millions to be a mystic in the Andes, wrote a cocaine and peyote fueled book of raving gibberish that several software billionaires swear is full of insight into the nature of information and consciousness and is where they got their billion dollar startup ideas, and ended your days as adopted chief of an African tribe where you run a tea plantation with your four native wives while guzzling a gallon of whiskey a day John McAfee style.

And maybe there’s a little bit of truth to that feeling. We probably all feel that we fell short of our potential in some way or another because we are all aware of times when we chickened out.

For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Where sinning and falling short equals chickening out, and where the glory of God equals pretty much literally the glory of God as you will see in the discussion below.

But I think there is more to it than that.

1.    Potentiality and actuality are just different.  Partly that is the common place insight that potentiality has no opportunity cost so you always have to lose a range of potentiality when you convert to actuality.  There is also something harder to grasp there, something to do with the difference between spirit and body, something to do with a difference between the pre-existence and mortality.

2. Like some quantum outcomes, glory is a property that requires an observer. We usually think of the observer as someone else or as ourselves looking back at our accomplishments.  But you can also be an observer looking forward to the things you hope to accomplish.  The summer of 69 mood where you see the golden future spreading out before you is the mirror of the nostalgic mood where you see the golden past. In both cases it is the distance an observation that allows you to see how good something was that wasn’t always obvious while you were in the middle of it.

It is as if you crested a ridge and look down into a sunlit valley, then walked through it in the heat of the day, and in the evening came up the ridge on the other side and turned and looked back.  Only on the ridge in the beginning and on the ridge at the end were you able to see how pleasing a prospect the valley was.

3. But most of all the reason your actual life did not quite live up to that fizz of excitement and potential you felt at the beginning is that no mortal life of any kind, Hollywood or gunrunner, can live up to your potential. When you first come into an adulthood you have a glimmer of who you were meant to be.

You were meant to be one with the streams and the sunrise and frolic with the Stars.