In the movie
City Slickers, three friends from New York go on a vacation to work at a cattle ranch.
They are supposed to help real cowboys move a herd of cattle from one ranch to another, then things go horribly wrong. The trail boss dies, the cook gets injured and the cowboys paid to move the cattle and the guests from ranch to the other abandon both cattle and people in the middle of the wilderness.
Its really a movie about male mid-life crisis and male relationships. It's also one of my favorite movies of all time. Here's the dialogue from the scene that meant the most to me. The two friends Phil and Ed are trying to move the herd through the mountains to the other ranch after the cowboys have left them and the rest of the guests have fled to safety.
Phil: "Look we did the best we could. Let's just leave the herd and get the hell out of here!"
Ed: "No! A cowboy doesn't leave his herd."
Phil "You are a sporting goods salesman!"
Ed: "Not today."
Ed's statement has more power when you take into account the beginning of the movie. The three friends spend all of their vacations doing dangerous things like the running of the bulls and skydiving, but they still have that restless feeling that middle aged men get. This time, Ed doesn't just treat this like an adventure he can walk away from, he treats it like its real life and that he is the one that chooses to define who he is.
The reason I can relate to this is that it perfectly illustrates that essential American ideal that individuals can choose to define themselves. We don't have to let the day to day life wash over us and define us by our work alone or by our place in society. Our entire world may have chosen to define us one way, but we are still the one who accepts or rejects that identity.
Many people think that you must be naturally gifted to do something, to write, sing, play an instrument. A gifting is helpful, but desire trumps gifting. If you desire to be something and you put your time and resources into becoming that thing, you will go farther than someone with simple gifting but who possesses no true desire to see that dream through.
In my later years in life I have found myself stepping away from what I thought I would be and finding my desires leading me. The desire to write, to play music and create is becoming more and more important to me and I'm finding whatever avenues I can to share what I create. When I feel that its a waste of time, and that voice that we all seem to have says to me, "You're not a poet, you're not a percussionist, you're a customer service rep! You need to spend time paying the mortgage! You're just a redneck kid from Oregon who flunked 9th grade grammar!".
So how do I answer that voice? How do we answer all the voices that tell us we can't be what we want to be? Just like Ed, I don't have the luxury of leaving the non-cowboy life totally behind. I still have to earn my bread for now. That doesn't mean I'm stuck. There are still days when I can respond to that voice telling me all that I can't be and tell it without a doubt in my voice, "Not today...not today"
