As an admittedly smug personality (that is, one who is notoriously complacent and self-approving) I consider the avenues and horizons of my limited activity to date are generally acceptable. I haven’t for example any pressing need to fulfill some lingering unrequited ambition. I’ve about done all that I would care to do. Though this may resound of capitulation or concession – or worse that narrowness of achievement peculiar to children and the uneducated – I do not intend to import that qualifying theme. I merely suffer a self-congratulatory satisfaction with life’s unpredictable repercussions and consequences. It is less a regret of what I haven’t done than an embrace of what I have done and of what has transpired. Complacency is such a complicated psychology!
Nonetheless, whether as the result of evolving curiosity (strangely a product of old age) or hope to do it all before the end (a more ambitious element of unrepentant greed), I have lately contemplated the things I’ve never done.
Hot Air Ballooning
Foremost on the list is hot air ballooning. It’s the artistry, the colour and the wind that appeal to me. Though I am not frightened of heights (indeed I believe I would gleefully look over the side of the basket), I don’t like the idea of having to purchase a hot air balloon and everything that goes with it. My extravagance surprisingly has its economic boundary! And most certainly I am not about to buy a cart and hook it to the back of my car for circulation of the device along anticipated dirt roads and fields. This is never going to happen! I shall therefore confine my magnetism to recalling Uncle Edouard (an elegant roué) in the Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B by JP Donleavy.
Snorkelling or Deep Sea Diving
As exotic and potentially magnificent as these enterprises may be, they are right out! I cannot imagine clipping a device to my mouth in order to preserve the singular feature of survival called air! Everything in my instinct tells me to deviate from those potentially precipitous adventures. Lloyd Bridges in Sea Hunt (1958) and David Attenborough’s investigations shall suffice to quell the rising urges.
Cooking Class
I have heard of people attending culinary schools in Europe. Forget it! I haven’t the desire to sport a smock covered with flour. I content myself instead with the recollection of our lunch by the Caribbean sea in the Dominican Republic under a lightly windswept canvass tent, complete with introductory martinis followed by freshly caught fish. And afterwards a snooze.
Sailing
The last time I remember being aboard a sailboat and sailing was one summer in the Baltic Sea when I returned home to Sweden from boarding school in Canada. The son of a friend of my father’s took me for a sail. It was work. I much preferred sitting inside the First Class bridge of the SS Arkadia when we went to Europe years earlier. There was no effort, no interfering blowing spume and no shortage of canapés. My mother clearly had taught me similar expiation as she lingered over cocktails with an Irish Catholic priest who was also traveling First Class. Apparently the Vatican and the Canadian government were equally magnanimous!
Speeding car
Toys have never been part of my sustenance. The anesthetized tranquillity and boulevard ride of a Cadillac is sufficient for my vehicular and transportation purposes. Once, well thrice, I owned a powerful 8-cylinder Mustang GTO but I soon learned they were inappropriate even if affordable. The Mustang, because of its inordinate traction, was completely useless in the winter. And by the time I approached retirement (when I might have enjoyed a convertible in Florida) I was too fat to get in and out. And the convertibles leaked in the automatic car wash, not a credit to any car!
A condo by the sea
Real estate is a deceit. It is about as useful and as unending in its projections as a box of Kleenex. There’s never enough and you always need more. Why the elevation of real estate has never attained the identical arch downward of rental storage I have no idea. The two are similarly destined; that is, you need more or you store what you don’t need until you forget you have it. Why anyone would consider it either a liberty or privilege to devote one’s life (unpaid) to property management and related inconvenience I shall never understand. There are people who do that stuff professionally. They know people to hire and complete without accommodation or inconvenience. Meanwhile being spared that dilemma one may instead spend time counting one’s money while nursing a whiskey and reading a good book. Volatility of insurance and infrastructure is limited to one’s jewelry bag. As for the rest, simply move on! I have to think mobility is the ultimate luxury, not confinement by any account.
Intermission
The distaste of complacency is not so much its contentment as its gloating. I say this by way of interruption of my monologue, to ensure my dear Reader that I haven’t any intention of belittling what may to some be important. Clearly each of us is different. I do however wish to emphasize that the unrestrained ambition to do everything in life is not supportable; nor, I believe, is it healthy. Forcing someone to the top of Mount Everest may have its irreparable consequences. And no one is spared (I am thinking of the late son Michel of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau who died in an avalanche while skiing in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park).
But the quelling of unlimited ambition in life goes beyond the possibility of error. For me it is not so much a physical threat as a psychological impediment. What draws us to the end of the road is as personal as what propels us. Variety is not for everyone. More of that complacency I’m afraid.