Hanging on to Passion

One of the ideas that most interests me as I age is how people hang on to the drive to accomplish big things late in life. Not many of us manage that. Most humans start out with all the drive they are going to have and watch it wither away until they are middle aged (which is 30-35, not 55 you math-disabled Boomers). From middle age on, they simply hang on hoping no one will notice that they just making the motions without conviction. The closest they get to having any life in their life is when they get excited about the events in someone else’s life; i.e. sports fans. As Superbowl Sunday approaches, I’m particularly reminded of this form of lifelessness.

Last year on advice taken from his book, Top Dead Center, Kevin Cameron convinced me to look at a truly passionate character, John Britten. Further inspiration came when another friend, Martin Belair, loaned me a video tape, One Man's Dream, the movie of the creation of the Britten Motorcycle. For some reason, the depth of Britten's creativity, drive, ability, and ability to inspire others to chase the same objectives didn't really grab me until I saw the film. Sometimes words are insufficient tools, even when they are used by really talented writers. But my point here is not to talk about John Britten. Better thinkers than I have made that case and I strongly recommend you do your own research. John Britten died in 1995 at the age of 45. At the time of his death, he seemed to be still on the rising edge of the curve of his passion for life.

Another baffling person is Wilson Greatbatch, an inventor of many things including introducing implanted medical devices to lithium batteries. Greatbatch was born in 1919 and I met him in 2001 at the medical device company where I was employed. In comparison, I was a young man, but Greatbatch emitted far more energy than the half-dozen of us who had shown up to hear this man talk about invention, creativity, motivation, inspiration, and other life-giving topics. I came away from meeting Greatbatch with a new level of disgust with myself for doing work that I didn't care about for a company that was motivated by greed and corruption. A little less than a year later, I was out of that business and on a completely different life path.

A few years earlier, I was lucky enough to meet one of my old motorcycling heroes, Dick Mann, at the Steamboat Springs Vintage Motorcycle event in Colorado. Dick was a successful racer on every surface and was someone I'd followed closely when I was a kid until he officially "retired" in 1974. He set records everywhere he went. The year I met him, 1994, he'd just turned 60 and he was about to compete in the Premium 500 "vintage motocross" event on a Rickman-framed BSA. He won that event in a hard-fought race with guys half his age, as if anyone should have been surprised. Mann continued to race vintage events for several years afterwards and is probably still building bikes and riding.

I can't claim to anything near the focus and passion of either Britten or Greatbatch or Mann. Having slipped past 60 and staring into the abyss of impotence, incontinence, and incompetence, maintaining the motivation to keep getting out of bed each day is, sometimes, a major achievement. The trick, I think, is to keep chasing your muse regardless of where or when it leads.

The reason that is a trick is that the chase is financially risky. The older we get, the less recovery time we have in case we make a career misstep. After the radcons demolished the economy with their double-whammy combination of superstition and corrupt incompetence, the hope that Social Security might act as a buffer for old age and low energy is vanishing. That can make the already conservative into outright cowards; “I hate what I’m doing, but it’s better than living on the street.” That is a formula for turning every day into a carbon copy of the previous days, but it’s not an irrational economic strategy.

One justification I have for occasional out-of-the-box adventures is that it reminds me, a little, that living on the street isn’t as bad as it looks from the comfort of my home. Of course, I don’t do many Minnesota winter adventures, so that fine theory is based on mostly comfortable weather. Still, it helps me refocus on what I really care about and I’m particularly looking forward to this summer’s trip because I think it’s time for another change.