Let’s take a trip, shall we? Our destination is Chautauqua Lake, September 2021. The pandemic is largely past us, COVID vaccines having become widely available. Hurricane Ida blew through Philadelphia just over a week ago, leaving massive flooding along the banks of the Schuylkill River. Our newly purchased Honda Civic, which we drove home through the beginnings of Ida’s tropical assault, is packed for my trip across Pennsylvania and into New York, full of snacks, instruments, and sports equipment.
The occasion? Mike is turning 40. His wife Sarah surprised him with a getaway at our friend Chad’s father’s lake house, meaning for about four days, the five of us were going to be able to spend our time boating, drinking, playing music, and generally enjoying each other’s company. And boy did we.
As I’ve mentioned in other posts, when this group of friends from Wittenberg gets together, it’s almost inevitable that there’s going to be music. I’ve been lucky enough to have surrounded myself with excellent musicians, whose skill puts my own meager talents in stark perspective. Still, I love hacking at my axe, harmonizing and screwing around as we work our way through whatever songs someone (usually Ryan) has decided we’re playing. Somehow, no one ever thinks to put together any kind of list of songs we want to be ready to play. And it’s fine—I don’t know if we’d practice them anyway. Not that those guys need the practice.
It was at this gathering, though, that I first came into contact with a song that has haunted me ever since: Colin Hay’s “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin.” Ryan called out the name, we all looked it up on Ultimate Guitar, and we mucked our way through, Ryan singing lead while the rest of us took aim at the surprisingly elusive rhythm. And as we played through, I listened to the lyrics.
They rocked me.
“Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” was first released on Colin Hay’s 1994 debut solo album, Topanga. However, the version most people are familiar with, and the one that charted the highest, is from his sixth album, 2001’s Going Somewhere. Rather than the heavily produced early version, the 2001 recording features only an acoustic guitar. Hay, who originally rose to fame as the front man for Men at Work, the Australian band best known for the song “Down Under,” wrings a deep pathos in this more stripped-down recording, and it is this version that has stuck with me since that day on Chautauqua Lake.
In some ways, it’s a little surprising I’d missed the song up until now. “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” has shown up in a number of movies and TV shows, perhaps most notably Scrubs. While I was not a religious Scrubs watcher, I’ve seen enough episodes and caught enough of the excellent soundtrack that my not having heard this particular song caught me unawares. In any case, now that I have heard it, I find I can’t escape it.
What was it about this song that rocked me so hard, you might ask? Well, let’s start with the first line: “Any minute now, my ship is coming in.” It’s easy to dismiss that line as cliché, an overused metaphor for one’s sincere hope that success is just over the horizon, ready to crest a wave and pull into port. But as the next few lines continue, it’s clear that the narrator has been waiting for a long time, and Hay drives home the point: “I’ll keep checking the horizon / And I’ll stand on the bow, and feel the waves come crashing / Come crashing down, down, down on me.”
When it really hits, though, is the chorus, where an invisible lover begs the singer to “be still my love, / open up your heart, let the light shine in.” There’s an earnestness behind this voice, a desperate entreaty to forget about all the things you haven’t achieved, and focus on the good. But the singer immediately undercuts this request, telling them “you don’t understand / I already have a plan,” because they’re “waiting for my real life to begin.”
And this, in essence, is the song. It is the story of a person who feels as though they know what their life is supposed to be, and that it doesn’t quite resemble the one they are living. And so they look to the future, to the point where that life they’re supposed to be living will actually begin. What is that life? It’s unclear. But it’s going to come, I just know it.
That day in September came at an odd time for me. My dad had died a few months before, and while I didn’t realize it at the time, I was struggling with what his passing meant for me, both in relation to him and how I saw my own life going forward. I had been living in Philadelphia for just over a year, and it had been a year and a half since I last worked in a theatre. It was the very definition of change, a total reorganization of the life I had been living since I started working at the Public Theater back in 2013. And after more than a year away from the theatre, I still had no idea what my life was going to be.
There’s a common complaint among many in my generation. Many of our parents were coached to tell their kids that they could be anything they wanted to be, that their futures were limited only by their imaginations. While I can’t fault the optimism, the truth—the rather obvious truth, in fact—is that we can’t always be what we want. We possess limitations, whether it be innate talent, social support, or differences in temperament, that can both aid and constrain us as we pursue our futures. Recognizing these limitations, and doing our best to maximize our strengths, is something that often got glossed over in that messaging.
Perhaps even more important, though, is that our parents omitted one other crucial fact: whether or not you can be or do anything, you cannot be or do everything.
As a committed non-parent, I have no idea what things are like today. But I know in my youth, kids were encouraged to do as many activities as possible, to participate in all the groups and sports and honors and whatever that they could squeeze into the day, in the interest of providing the most possible opportunities for building a complete, happy person. The result? A relatively large segment of the population that struggles with anxiety over not being and doing everything as adults.
I grew up as the child of a former musician, and my love of the arts was encouraged at a young age. I was not pressured to join a bunch of extracurriculars, but I was trained to give my all to whatever I had committed to, a trait I do not regret but that left me reluctant to say no to a commitment that proved unfulfilling or, worse, damaging. It’s not my parents’ fault, of course. There’s no one to place fault with. It’s simply the world we grew up in, one that has now shifted almost entirely away from the idea of a complete person towards a kind of narrow, professionalized culture of doing.
This feeling of waiting for my real life to begin started to hit during my last year at Baltimore Center Stage. I liked the job, and I loved the people I worked with. I was proud of the things we accomplished, and I wouldn’t change a thing about the path that let me there. Still, by the fourth year, my seventh working essentially full-time in a scene shop, I found myself unsatisfied. What was I doing here? Where was I going to go? Once again: what was the endgame?
As we grow up, there’s a sense that at some point we’ll find a switch, one that we can flip from “child” to “adult,” as though there’s a discrete moment when we shift into being a fully formed Grown Up. For most of us, of course, there’s no such switch. There’s no definable point at which we officially graduate into adulthood. It’s just assumed that at some point we’ve made the change, put childhood behind us and officially entered the world of self-possessing, decision-making, fully formed adults.
Is that the point we’re supposed to put our dreams away and focus on the reality of our lives?
Perhaps it’s a little dramatic to put it in those terms. But that’s where “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” really hits me. It’s great to have dreams, to have ideas. I have them constantly. I am a fountain of ideas, a real gusher of grandiose plans. Half the papers on my desk are covered in plans for the future, lists and checklists and benchmarks and goals upon goals upon goals, all of them stacked haphazardly atop one another, rarely with more than one or two items checked off or struck through. Because, as it turns out, ideas aren’t worth shit if you don’t do anything to follow through.
My greatest enemy is tomorrow. Tomorrow is full of possibilities. Tomorrow is the day everything gets done. Tomorrow is when ideas become realities, when that ship finally reaches port and lets me climb aboard. Tomorrow is, according to the song, when “there’s sure to be that call.” All I have to do is wait, because tomorrow…that is when my real life really begins.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” is another song that tends to freak me out. In this song, Springsteen catalogues the people in an everyday town that sit at the bar and spend their days trading stories about their youth, the titular “glory days.” The song is an energetic lament, both of the lives that seem to have passed the characters by as well as the future the narrator pictures for himself, drinking alongside these folks and sharing his own “boring stories of / glory days.”
It’s easy to listen to this song and think, “Dear god, I don’t want to wind up being that guy.” But that doesn’t help, right? Because it doesn’t answer—or even ask—the real question: if not that guy, then who?
Sometimes I try to reassure myself that asking the question means I’m working on the answer. If I’m thinking about how I want to define myself, then I’m not settled or content with being who I am today. There’s power in this kind of uncertainty, a strength built on the prospect of possibility. The moment you feel content, that you feel utterly complete, is the moment you decide who you’re going to be for the rest of your life. And frankly, I don’t have the answer to that yet. I doubt I ever will.
But with the power of that uncertainty comes the potential for paralysis. To be uncertain, to be unsure of the future and what direction you want to take, leaves you vulnerable to inertia, and that can quickly transform into stagnation. And that’s when you find yourself sitting in bars longing for the glory days that have passed you by, that will never come again, unable to imagine what forms new glory might take.
For me, I sometimes worry that I spend too much time waiting for that ship to come in, or for that call to come. I worry that the most interesting things I’ll do with my life have already come to pass, and that I’ll spend much of the remaining years reminiscing about a past that fades further and further into the distance. I wish I had the answer for avoiding these feelings. I suspect it’s pretty much just taking one step after the other, moving forward in some direction—any direction.
Just be here now. Forget about the past.
Be still, my love. Open up your heart.
Let the light shine in.
MetaFrizzics 