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There is a young man in my life who is in the process of recovery from substance abuse. He never graduated high school, has no job or income, and doesn't have any sort of health insurance or unemployment benefits. Talk about starting from square one.
As a logical mature grown-up may assess the situation, I determine that his first step should be to get medical coverage and seek the help he needs to get well, to study for and then take his GED exam, and to get a job and start to get back on his feet.
He went out a bought a telescope.
"A telescope?" I asked him. "Why would you go out and buy a telescope?"
"I don't know... for fun, I guess." He seemed puzzled by my reaction.
I'm not encouraged by this behavior, because to my mind it does not demonstrate responsibility, or a critical awareness of his situation and how he should go about changing it - yet he seems clear, focused, happy.
Then it occurred to me: Perhaps he is doing the one thing that so many of us fail to do. So many of us barrel ahead into the future unaware, following the scripts written for our lives by other people who are way too sure that they know just exactly what is good and right for us. Under that influence, we do the dance, we buy the goods, we fall in line. And then we turn to our own drugs - work, wine, sex, exercise, (insert your own poison here) - to escape the pain, maybe to forget about the gnawing gap in our souls - the gap that might have been filled if we'd taken the time to look around a bit first, take a long view, consider the vastness of the skies, the wonders of the universe, and our place within it, and answer our questions with our own answers.
My young man has lived a limited life, seeing the world through a very narrow crack in a drafty old door. Perhaps the perfect thing for him to do before he starts down the road of health and independence is to buy a telescope, and take some time to take a good look around... explore the possibilities of what lies ahead, and then choose his path.
In fact, maybe I'll go buy a telescope, too.
Peace,
Julie
Julie is the author of Taking the Stairs: My Journal of Healing and Self-Discovery and Body Wizardry: Releasing the Champion Within, now available through Kindle.
