Loose Change

When I was younger, especially during my high school and junior college days, I would make frequent trips to San Francisco.   Most of the time, these trips were just random outings to get some late night food, roam around the streets of downtown, and just feel the ambience of the city.  Of course, these trips would regularly be after 10pm so the city was never too congested.  Still, to us, being young kids just starting to experience life and the freedom of doing things ourselves the city was brimming with activity from our standpoint.  We would drive across the Bay Bridge or surface in downtown via BART and randomly walk thru places like Union Square, North Beach, Chinatown, Justin Herman Plaza......we never did anything fancy, but we always we're so excited to be there.

One thing about going to San Francisco so late at night is that you tend to run into and see more evidence of the homeless.  You can see them rummaging through trash bins, setting up their card board "beds" in front of shops with awnings, and some already asleep.  On these trips to SF, I nearly always took a huge pocket full of change with the intent of passing out small amounts of change to the many homeless individuals I was sure to run into on any particular night.  Many times, I would go into a Burger King or Carl's Jr near the Powell Street BART Station and buy them a cheap burger.  I really did do it just because it made me feel better and it genuinely felt like the right thing to do.

On one particular night in downtown Oakland, I ran into a homeless guy outside of the small Chinese cafe we were eating at.  I was out of change but had a $5 bill in my pocket and decided to give it to him (remember I was all of 16 years old at this time and this was back in 1995, so $5 was a bit more of a sacrifice than it sounds like now).  I felt good as I went back into the cafe to finish my meal.  Later that night, however, as we made our way to Jack London Square to hang out, I ran into the exact same homeless guy who had taken the money I had given him and it turns out he used the money to buy a small bottle of liquor.  I think that was a turning point for me in handing out money to the homeless.

As I grew older countless other experiences wrongfully taught me to stray away from my kinder, gentler, and perhaps, more gracious versions of myself.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.  I've become more skeptical of most things people say. I find the virtue of patience extremely hard to find.  I constantly struggle with ugly qualities such as hypocrisy, greed, and envy.  Generosity is completely absent from my mind most hours of the day.  Anger and rage too often rear their tendencies over the smallest of life's events, such as my commute home to and from work.  I probably can count the number of truly selfless acts in a year on one hand.  Depression overtakes me too often and I find my mind has drifted largely to a pessimistic view on my future and life.  And so I ask myself this simple question: how is it in all the time that has passed, all the lessons I should have learned, and all the good people that surround me - have I still managed to be come half the man I was when I was a high schooler?

The funny thing is, I usually hear people talk about how childish and immature they were in high school, but I find myself remembering how much more compassionate, accepting, patient, and content I used to be.  Content, I can hardly remember what that feels like.  But I can remember the frequent feeling of being content and happy doing simple things like playing basketball until the sun set and looking up at the sky as I walked to my car and thinking "this is exactly where I want to be and what I want to be doing at this time......" Those moments are fleeting for me now.  Or how happy I would be to submerged in a group of friends all finding time to hang out and do nothing exciting but be around each other.  Even then, I remember how I would think to myself how good life felt at that moment, and I tried to hold onto it like a handful of sand as long as I could. But I could feel the sand slipping through my fingers, and by the time I started working and started to experience the corporate bullshit I could feel the hopefulness and cheery youth of my past vanish right before me.  Add on a wedding and marriage along with mortgage of a home and you have the cocktail for what many consider adulthood, or what I consider to be the exit of childhood.

I suppose it's not all bad though. I mean, I did learn a bit about being a little more financially savvy, holding myself accountable and responsible for supporting my family, and along the way experienced  the lessons of bankruptcy, heartbreaks, broken dreams, and addictions.  And though I've changed substantially from the person I once was, with eyes a bit less hopeful, a mind a bit more closed off and an attitude a bit more sarcastic and stubborn, I'm hoping that I can still right the ship for my outlook on life.  I'm not quite sure I would even recognize myself today if my high school self saw me.  What I do know is this: till this day, when I meet someone I judge that person's confidence based  on how easily they can make fun of themselves, their success on how many great stories they can tell (and how well they can tell them), their loyalty on the depth and age of the stories their friends tell about them (no matter if their heroic or sarcastic), and their amicability based on the topics they choose to discuss with you.  If, when they laugh, they laugh with their entire body and their smile makes me want to smile, then that's bonus points.  This is the first time I've written it down, but I can tell you that those are subconsciously some of the ways I choose my friends and how I gauge their worth to me. And that hasn't changed, and I hope it never does.

If nothing else, I hope I can pass what I think is one of the few good philosophies on life that I possess: surround yourself with the as many good friends as you can, find time in life to make memories that will turn into great stories, and never let being scared or the fear of embarrassment rob you of some of the best opportunities for blissful success or epic failure (which might cause hysterical laughter at your cos)t. Because there's a very simple scenario I play in my mind when I think about myself getting old and wrinkly: when I tell stories to my grandkids or random youngsters that have the patience to listen to an old man speak, it won't be stories of how big your house was, how fancy of a car you used to drive, or how much money you made......it'll be stories of bungee-jumping off 1000+ ft buildings in Vegas, scuba diving in the caribbean, getting beat up with a friend, farting in the middle of a huge lecture hall, crashing my parents car, or marrying the first girl I kissed that will really get their attention. And like giving out loose change to the homeless that needed money when I was young, having stories of risk, willingness, and zeal may fuel the need of the next generation to get some perspective on life.