What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever?
I was at university when Jackson Browne released The Pretender. There was a music room where people supposedly went to study, although Jackson Browne’s For Everyman and Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark seemed to be permanently playing. I often went there when I had a spare hour. It was a formative time, when I was trying to decide what mattered and what I would spend my life doing.
One line from The Pretender stayed with me:
Caught between the longing for love
And the struggle for the legal tender
We do not simply drift through life. We make choices, consciously or otherwise, about what will have first claim on our time, energy and loyalty. Jackson Browne understood how easily youthful hopes can be exchanged for security, routine and respectable success.
Perhaps we are too quick to dismiss youthful idealism as naïve. Certainly, young people can underestimate the complexity of life. But they can also see with unusual clarity. Before responsibility, caution and self-interest crowd in, they sometimes ask the questions the rest of us have learned to avoid. What is worth giving my life to?
Somewhere during those university years, I decided that meaning mattered more than money. I would need to earn a living, but I did not want earning a living to become the reason I lived. I wanted devotion to people and ideals to matter more than wealth. I have never regretted that decision.
The difficult part is that such choices are not made only once. The struggle between love and legal tender continues. Idealism must survive ordinary pressures, compromises and disappointments.
Perhaps maturity is not the abandonment of youthful ideals. Convictions formed in youth are not phases you outgrow, but insights worth protecting.
The Afterword 
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