The greatest practical joke of them all?

Is it daft to expect one day to have an experience exactly like Bobby Ewing's in the shower?

Patrick Duffy in ‘that scene’ from Dallas

I suspect I’m not the only one who has the dream that I’ll wake up one morning and find the last forty-plus years of my life have been wiped out and I’m back where I was in the early 80s.

“That was the rehearsal,” a voice will say. “Now’s your chance to live life properly…” Perhaps that desire’s partly why I’m drawn to this quote from Glenn Close in The Natural: “I believe we have two lives: the life we learn with, and the life we live with after that.” The dream wants the ‘second life’ to be exactly that…

At a fundamental level Close is right, of course; how can what she say not be true? But I do wonder how many of the lessons we should learn we actually do, and then — if learned — whether we act on as many as we could. Take a look at our so-called ‘leaders’ around the world right now and you’ll see far to many who appear determined to prove that they’ve learned nothing at all.

But why go back? Ask many people whether they’d like to be a teenager again and a huge proportion are likely to screw up their faces at the prospect. Or mime vomiting. Give them a choice and maybe they’ll pick a different point, when they were 30 or 42 or 7 or some age that was important to them for a specific reason — usually when things changed for the better. Or when they still have a chance to stop the ‘bad stuff’ from happening.

Me?

That’s easy. I’d go back to being the person who wrote this:

From the Lighthouse

So that was it,
the journey of a lifetime,
resolution of the myth.
There was no romance
only solitude in the echoes
on the dark stone stairway;
only discomfort in the harsh salt-spray.
Who could want this disappointment,
the looking back over the shoulder
at nothing in particular?

Perhaps it’s only here we attain
some understanding
of the soaring of a gull
upon the grey-white winds,
between the lighthouse and the land.

Perhaps.

But who can explain
why unsaved ships still blindly steer
onto waiting rocks?

If it were no more than dream
the lighthouse would be gone,
our search for meaning satisfied,
the intrusion relieved.
Looking back over the shoulder
at nothing in particular,
the lighthouse is there still.

That would be my launch pad. Appropriate metaphor don’t you think, given the context of this post?

Having learned all my writing lessons since then, I’d blast off into literary space from there.

Sadly, however, the theory’s a balloon which is all to easy to prick. If I hadn’t led the life I have I would never have reached this point, produced this Substack, written this post in this exact way. Maybe I’d never have lusted after my Bobby Ewing moment.

It’s all very self-defeating.

Where does that leave me/us? Well, back with Glenn Close of course, and the recognition that living with what we’ve learned can only be executed in our single-threaded existence, one populated with a myriad of learning points — and hopefully adjustments — along the way.

So I continue to beat the drum and try and ignore the noise: I write my words and read some others’; try and be the best version of myself I can (hard, that one!); keep my fingers crossed; hope for validation.

But then that’s one dream you probably do share with me…

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