No One Aspires to Complacency.

As I sit here listening to the WFUV online radio stream and drinking my morning coffee, I am struck by how cool I thought those things were when I first considered them. When a friend sent me the link to the Public Radio station at Fordham University, I remember hearing the first sounds come over my speakers, and how I thought that it was such a great radio station. I felt like I had been clued in to something great, and no doubt I had been, but what I was so excited about has long since become routine.

Same thing goes for coffee. I remember in my previous life as an office worker, a fellow wage slave drank his coffee black, every day. I thought, "Damn, that is a hard man. If I drank black coffee, I would be just as cool." A zillion cups of black coffee later, I don't even think about it. I could go on and on; this pair of sneakers, that stereo component, this bookbag, that piece of furniture. Admittedly most of these things are simple material baubles. While I still look for new things to keep me excited about the prospect of routine daily living, I always seem to grow complacent with the things that I once thought would tilt the earth's axis in my favor. This isn't to say I don't enjoy these things, but simply that they don't garner as much attention from me as they did when they were new to me. They get incorporated into my daily rhythm and march in perfect time.

I wonder if I could meet a former version of myself, say from 10 years ago, would the "old" me be impressed with the "new" me? If I took the "old" me around, and showed him/me what my life was like today, would he/I say "Damn, you are one cool guy," or would he/I observe something different altogether? I'd like to think that he'd be impressed, cool radio stations and black coffee not withstanding.