The Machine by Tommy Johnson

This is one of my favorite blogs. If I see other great writings by people, I will post them on my blog as well. Keep reading to inspire yourself so you may eventually inspire others...

My Machine by Tommy Johnson

My uncle Mike is a smart man. Brilliant even. His intelligence is not immediately recognized, as it is with those who have cutting eyes and sharper clothes, but rather is conveyed through his ability to speak for hours, usually in the quiet places of an evening or among the waves of the Gulf, about everything that he has learned in his life. And he does know everything. He knows that the chemical in the eye that makes night vision possible is called rhodopsin. He knows every letter of morse code. His stories stretch on for miles, and I love to sit and listen to his voice as we push four knots along the Texas coast. The other evening while we were talking, he said something to me that made me think about my future, which is something I avoid doing because of how uncertain things have become. He said that, in order for us to be happy, we all have to build our own machine. He called it the Money Making Machine. These Machines are made up of many parts, the cogs and gears being our experiences and education, the fuel and oil being our motivation and our opportunities. He said that, unless we build our Machines right, we will forever be behind, forever be trying to get our Machines to work properly and never get to admire and enjoy the efficiency of our invention.
There are some things that hang around in the mind, that beat their wings against the glass but never really escape. This thing that Mike said stayed with me for quite a while, and made me start thinking about my Machine. Well, I thought, lets look at what I have built in the first 24 years:
Education? Check, although with a fairly worthless English degree.
Personality? Check. I feel that I could excel in almost any social or business situation.
Unique experiences, skills or talents? Not so much, unless you consider being able to efficiently take a dinner order or write a mean term paper on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in North Korea and valuable workplace commodity.
Opportunities? Haha. Sorry, I thought that was a joke.

So, at this point my machine looks a little broken, just a pile of scrap metal, wasted time, and late-night basement dreams that never got off the ground. Not such a good start, I admit. And every day that passes, the urgency to begin construction seems to be increasing. The cost of parts is rising, the workers are threatening to strike. Someone seems to have misplaced the plans.
I'm not even sure what I would want my machine to look like. Would I want it to run shiny and new, fire-engine red and spitting out luxury cars, Italian marble countertops and vacations to Disney World, all while pouring in fuel made of 80 hour work weeks and wing-tipped shoes? Do I want it smell like leather and sweat, to chug and rattle along barely providing warmth and security while I get to be the father that goes to every little league game? Do I even want a machine at all? Do I want to invest in the American dream that sees one half of all marriages end in divorce, that watches the elderly go without health care and the middle-class struggling to keep their heads above the rising tides? At what point did my Uncle Mike, my father, or the various other successful people I know, determine that money is the only path to happiness?
My problem is this: I believe I DO want a Machine. I want to be able to buy my wife everything that makes her smile, to know that my children will never want for anything, to never have to bite my nails to the quick wondering where the money will come from next. I do not desire wealth, but security. I just don't want it right now. See, I always imagined myself leading two lives. In the first life, I was a man of the world. I had a beard and I traveled to places others had only seen in magazines. I made thousands of friends and fell in love every day, I did not have an address and could only claim what would fit on my back or in my car. I was penniless but free. This part of my life I would call The Story.
Now the second life that I imagined was ordinary but perfect. I had met a girl who made me fall in love for the last time, and had children who were beautiful and wonderfully creative and destructive. I had two suits, and wore a tie to work. I had lost touch with most of my friends, and drove a reliable foreign car that got good gas mileage. I owned a golden retriever. This part of my life I would call The Dream.
My dilemma with the duel-life fantasy is something that I seemed to have overlooked when concocting this plan: How am I to reconcile The Story and The Dream? Should I choose to follow one path over the other, it may ultimately lead to the demise of its counterpart. I cannot raise a daughter and pay a mortgage while photographing the desolate sublimity of Asia on the Trans-SIberian railway. Transversely, how am I to backpack through the vineyards of Southern France if I have an important meeting in the office on Thursday and my Kia needs transmission work? The two plans often seem mutually exclusive, which is frustrating because I feel that, without experiencing both, my life will seem unfulfilled. And all the while, the urgency to begin construction on my Machine remains.
I suppose the logic is sound. Anything that is worth having takes time and work. If I want my Machine to run at maximum efficiency in order to pump out engagement rings and ponies and football pads, I need to begin NOW. After all, what girl is going to want to waste her time waiting for nice things while I tinker with the bells and whistles of my Machine in the garage, and what kid is going to love me if I can't buy him the top-of-the-line soccer cleats? Right? Or so the logic seems to suggest.

Amidst all this uncertainty, among all the options (or lack thereof) that have temporarily paralyzed me, through the self-doubt, the terrible grades and the looming sense of failure, a couple of voices have managed to reach my ears that have both disarmed and inspired me. The first was from my friend Corey, who is not necessarily known for his wisdom (or even his ability to form complete sentences). Last January, as we sat outside barefoot on a porch in Summit County, Colorado, Corey let me have it. Granted, he was drunk and probably still has no recollection of any of the things he said to me that night, but the alcohol somehow tapped a spring of resentment that had been waiting to burst from his throat and pour through his teeth. He told me, more or less, that I was a loser. "Do you understand that everyone you know, EVERYONE wishes they had what you have going for you? And what the hell are you doing? NOTHING." Of course, these sentiments were slurred and littered with profanity, but the message was clear: "Your wasting your life, man. You need to start building your Machine, or soon it will be too late and you'll never find happiness".
My initial response to this was to be defensive and infuriated. I don't take criticism all that well, especially coming from a punk kid two years my junior. Furthermore, I definitely don't appreciate people imposing their own value system on me, and claiming that just because I am not actively pursuing a six-figure salary, I am quickly on my way to loserdom. What right did anyone have to tell me how to live this life? If I want to screw it up, its my decision. Those hurtful words stayed with me for the rest of my stay in Colorado, and echoed against my bedroom walls every night while I tried to fall asleep. I was determined to ignore Corey until another voice, the voice of my cousin Jolly, came through to me almost a month later. In words that seemed to be planned but powerfully sincere and insightful, Jolly spoke to me as if I was both a boy and an equal. He told me that I could not avoid it, that my destiny was to be a leader and do great things. He said that everyone was waiting, though not impatiently, for God to carry out his plans for my life, and that at some point I would have to embrace this and grow up. He was not condescending, nor preachy, and he did not speak with the sense of urgency that I expected to accompany such words. He told me these things as if he was telling a secret, as if he had seen years into my future and wanted to share it with me.
Its funny, I expected Jolly to be the one speaking most adamantly about the Machine, and the possibilities for endless joy that were hidden among its gears and wires. But he didn't say a word about my prospective occupations or how my life would be enriched by wealth and possessions. Instead, he spoke only about my potential, and how it was waiting for me to discover just how far it could take me. I liked the idea that my potential wasn't necessarily only valued when spent on making my Machine. I liked the idea that great things can exist outside the realm of money and cars and Italian countertops. I guess everyone has been trying to tell me the same thing all along, but their own priorities about monetary worth and financial success clouded their message and scattered the frequencies beyond my comprehension. Jolly just found a way to make it easier to swallow: It doesn't matter whether you're writing your Story or living out your Dream, just get it started. There is no excuse to procrastinate any longer, there is no reason to waste any more time. You have to make something now, you have to create a life that you will be proud of. This is no one else's but yours. This is the only shot you get, make it a good one.
Perhaps not everyone has had an experience like mine. I doubt that everyone has friends that will verbally kick them in the teeth, or a family that will bite their tongues thinking "We'll just give him a little more time. I'm sure he'll get himself together any day now". For what its worth, I'm thankful for both. I'm still unsure what the future holds for me, but at this point, it doesn't really matter. I know, once again, what every little kid knows without a doubt: I can do anything, great things are waiting for me, for any of us who want to find them. I have a Story to write.

Mark Twain: My Hero