Flights of Fancy

[dragon wench]

Have you ever been possessed by what seems to be an utterly mad, life-altering idea.... and followed it through... or, at least, have you seriously considered following it through?

You see, this morning, my SO and I were sitting out on the patio contemplating life and current circumstances, when we started to joke about selling our place (we bought it pre-construction several years ago...and real estate prices have since skyrocketed in Vancouver ), buying a sail boat, and giving the world the three-fingered salute. The thought of shedding all kinds of worries in one fell swoop and sailing around the world for a year does hold real appeal.... And yes, while on the surface it sounds entirely crazy, it would, in fact, deal with a number of issues confronting us.

lol! The ideas that can arise over coffee while sitting in the warm summer sun.....


Anyone else ever been grabbed by a mad idea that actually seems within the realm of possibility.. and even has a practical application?

[shana]

@DW--you can't get on the internet from a boat!!!!!

That actually sounds wonderful!

[Lestat]

Well, I started working with Médecins Sans Frontières, didn't I. And I did so for almost 4 years.

A certain amount of calculation entered the question, but fingers & toes would not be sufficient to count the people that called me crazy. I never regretted it and it altered my life in the way that I'm now irrevocably tied up with the aid and development world.

... unless of course another flight of fancy strikes me.

[JonIrenicus]

Nice thread...

Yes I have quite a few "crazy ideas that could work" and I am pursuing them now. I mean Bill gates and Steve Jobs had some crazy ideas and now look where they are. Life is too short to think things like "I wonder what could have been if I just took the risk." You know?

Mine involves getting a real job (hopefully within the month), patents, and some side trades. Oh, I only need one finger and a few choice select tupac words

If you guys really want to do that, don't let anything stop you, seriously. Life is what you make it and if you aren't making it into anything that motivates you, then that sucks. Do what you want, travel, have a blast.

[Chimaera182]

Yeah, I suppose my proposed trip to do volunteer work could be counted as one of those. But as the months went on and I thought on it more and more, I caught up with myself. I think it was just a need to kick myself in the rear for mellowing down after being dumped, and I know I wanted to take a trip to Australia real bad (I got stuck with Ecuador instead), so I jumped at the opportunity. But then, the sadist in me overcame what little philanthropist had been born and squashed it but good. Now, the only life-altering changes I make concern things most people would consider every-day choices. Par example, I'm finally applying for a new part-time job. This shall alter my life in a huge way.

[C Elegans]

I think this is a difficult question to answer. I don't really find life-style altering ideas crazy at all as long as they are not clearly destructive and clearly outside of realism. On the contrary, it is often much more crazy to stay sort of semi-happy in a stagnant, routine-ridden existence with too little development and too few challenges. To me, it is not crazy at all to sell your house, quit your job and go sailing around the earth instead - in fact, I know several people who have done just that, people who are by no means crazy but rather unusally sensible.

As for me, I don't think I've done anything particularly crazy at all except for a few unnecessarily dangerous expeditions in my youth.
When I was a teenager, my parents who were quite conventional and very concerned about social norms, though it was crazy of me to go around the globe alone with almost no money doing nothing obviously productive (ie not having a decent job or a decent education). I am sure they would have preferred if I spent my time, energy and money on getting a nice home or something rather than on journeys to places they had never even heard about. After a few years, when they saw what I got out of it in terms of personal development and knowledge, they changed though and now they view my travelling years as one of my best life choices.

Personally, I am rarely interested in people who haven't done anything else than lived during similar life conditions all their lives, and have no other desires or impulses. Not that I think it's wrong in any way, it's just that of all people I come in contact with, the friends or colleagues that I tend to form relationships with, are people with diverse interests and variated background. For instance, I've supervised numerous students over the years. The one student I still remember as the most promising of them all, was a girl who later moved to another part of the world. Before starting uni, this girl trained martial arts at elite level. Then another person attacked her outside of competition, and damaged her knees so badly so she ended up in a wheelchair. She had to cease martial arts, but instead of ruminating her fate, she decided that as soon as she could walk again, she would go to Australia and learn how to surf. Her goal was to learn how to make a tunnel. It took a little more than one year of hard training. After that, she went back to Sweden and started uni. In the middle of her studies, she decided to go to Africa and study something else, just for the experience. So she did, but unfortunately there was a civil war in the country she went to, so her planned studies took a little longer than expected. In any case, she returned to Sweden and finished her degree.
Crazy? Not at all. On the contrary, the perfect candidate for the job! Her life choices told me that this was a person who was able to struggle through misfortunes, set new challenges and goal for herself and fulfil them with determination and success.

In my opinion, people who view everything but the most conventional and normative behaviours as "crazy" simply have no idea how to live a good life

[ik911]

Originally Posted by dragon wench

Anyone else ever been grabbed by a mad idea that actually seems within the realm of possibility.. and even has a practical application?

Yes, in fact... Going to Brazil for a couple of months for various reasons, like getting some life experience and to get to know how it is to be in a less fortunate country. The only thing is that I'd have to interrupt my studies for that and that's just not the best idea... So I guess I'll stay here for a little longer.

[ch85us2001]

Not particularilly. Good old Ohio and drag racing. *shrugs*

[snoopyofour]

I thought it was a one-fingered salute. Usually my flights of fancy involve me thinking about howawesome it would be to quit my job and cuss out most of the people in my office. But I haven't really ruled that out of the realm of possibility.

[fable]

Originally Posted by snoopyofour

I thought it was a one-fingered salute. Usually my flights of fancy involve me thinking about howawesome it would be to quit my job and cuss out most of the people in my office. But I haven't really ruled that out of the realm of possibility.

Reminds me of one of James Thurber's delightful stories, "The Catbird Seat." An elderly employee is being gradually forced out of his job by a new, high-powered female exec hired to run the company and whose message can be summed up as "streamlining" and "innovation." She de-humanizes the old, face-to-face work methods, and moves between berating and condescending to this particular employee over his stodgy attitude. Finally, she enters her office late one night and finds him ensconsced in her chair, with an open bottle of scotch. He tells her that he's planted bombs in all her new equipment, and has arranged hit contracts on the new efficiency team she's hired. He's in the catbird seat, he says. Furious, she says they'll just see how things go tomorrow, as he saunters out.

The following day she calls the executive employees together and launches into a blistering attack of this elderly employee, who sits there looking shocked. He's a mild, conservative, grey sort of man, so of course no one can believe anything she says. Nor did anybody see him stay after dark; he is punctilious by habit over 4 decades of service. She ends up screaming in fury, and has to be escorted out by force, finally realizing what he's really done but incapable of convincing anybody. Decisions of hers are immediately halted, and there's talk by attending board members of seeking out a new CEO. Of course, that elderly employee is solicitously attended by the other staff, who think he's been victimized, as he chortles inwardly with glee. Yes, indeed: the catbird seat.

For myself, though these are delightful daydreams, the best sort are the kind you can turn into reality. Like CE, I think there's no school like experience if you have some common sense and an ability to absorb lessons in life. It isn't all about doing a job, or playing a game, or interfacing with a computer. It's about pushing the boundaries of self back through challenging what you believe, and learning new things that open up areas you never considered before. That's a way of turning flights of fancy into reality.

[snoopyofour]

That's an awesome story. I do think there's a lot to be said for pushing your limits, both physically and mentally (although doing it physically tends to have more concrete risks and rewards). I once tried to stay up for a week just to see if I could. After day three I didn't really even feel tired although I noticed that I had lots of trouble writing, typing, and driving. But it all ended when I foolishly tried to pass the time by seeing a movie. It was "The Hills Have Eyes" and I'd heard it was really intense so I figured it could keep me awake. Wrong, I was gone before the father died. I slept through two showings before a theater employee woke me up and escorted me out (he had to, I could barely walk). Then I slept the night in my car, couldn't drive in that state. I haven't tried again since.

[fable]

Interesting. I applaud your attempt to try pushing your limits. I only hope you had someone around to monitor your activities, in case something really went wrong.

As a lifelong asthmatic, I suppose the greatest challenge I've undertaken to my physical limitations was traveling up the Canaima River to Angel Falls in the Venezuelan portion of the Amazon basin, back in the late 1980s. My wife and I did this with 10 other people in dug-out canoes, using a native guide. Actually, he'd gone native back in the late 1940s, being an Italian immigrant. He married into one of the remote tribes. As a good Italian, he thought men should do all the canoe lifting when the river was at low points, which was stupid, since my wife probably has five times my stamina. It was a fun and challenging time, however. Took us about 4 days, and was not without mishaps that are amusing in retrospect, but could have gotten fatally serious at the time.

Mentally, I've always tried to challenge myself. I constantly read to find out more of how the world and its people and their doings truly operate. Anything less, I feel, is settling for acceptance of what we're told, and while there's a measure of truth in our cultural beliefs, a lot of it is fancy, too. I'd even urge adoloscents, if they can, to postpone college, to take a year or two and go learn a trade or help a village somewhere in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia: break down the barriers our societies deliberately build up. Then come back, and get on with the book-learning, since you'll have filters in place against some of the nonsense you're told.

[snoopyofour]

Sounds cool. Reminds me of a canoe trip two friends of mine and I took last summer though ours was much less exotic, albeit probably more hellish. We took a road trip to a camping site in Arkansas. None of us had ever been canoeing before and we paid dearly for our inexperience. The highlight (if the word "highlight" can be used to refer to something utterly horrible) was when I ended up being drug through a patch of harsh rapids while trying to hold on to our half-submerged canoe while one of my friends clung to a rock trying to recover from the minor concussion he had recieved when we were flipped. Meanwhile my other friend is laughing at us from the safety of his innertube. Then we notice that it has begun to lightening and we're in an aluminum canoe. But we can't afford to get out because if we do we won't be able to make it off the camping premises in time and we didn't bring enough cash to pay for another night. So when we finally emerge from the river, bruised and bloodied, we find that our car had been broken into and that guitars and most of our clothes!? have been stolen. Not to mention we had to make a normally seven hour drive with a donut because we couldn't find any place to buy a new tire. Now when people tell me I have an irrational fear of Arkansas I can only shudder and say "You weren't there man..you weren't there."

[snoopyofour]

Is there any way to delete a previous post? My pc and this site don't get along so sometimes I end up posting twice.

As regards mental excercises, modern criticism and "The Death of the Author" have pretty much crippled my interest in literature. Mostly now I just read old-school philosophers, books on post-modern theory, and southern writers. I've got some transcendentalism in me so I tend to believe that most truths must be discovered and understood internally.

[Luis Antonio]

Originally Posted by ik911

Yes, in fact... Going to Brazil for a couple of months for various reasons, like getting some life experience and to get to know how it is to be in a less fortunate country. The only thing is that I'd have to interrupt my studies for that and that's just not the best idea... So I guess I'll stay here for a little longer.

Do not lie to me. If you come, i'll have the exterminators on you. It will be a happy day