life's little questions

A few weeks ago I made the mistake of starting -- but not finishing -- a novel before school started. As a result, and because it seemed to lose its way through the middle, finishing it dragged out for three weeks. I'm glad I stuck with it, though, because there was a passage toward the end that made me sit up and pay attention. The situation was not immediately familiar (a failed musician finding out why his girlfriend dumped him months earlier -- not that I've never painted a lousy picture or been dumped before) but the message was loud and clear. It'll sound somewhat simplistic and melodramatic out of context (the book itself is actually a sort of tragicomedy) but what the hell. Here it is anyway:

"I never said anything about finishing with you because you weren't going to be a rock star," said Lizzie after awhile. "You know that really, don't you?"
I shook my head. I didn't know, did I? Not once in this story have I ever owned up to any kind of misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise. So far as I was concerned, she was dumping me because I was a musical loser.
"So what did you say, then? Try again. And I'll listen real hard this time."
"It's not going to make any difference now, because we've all moved on, right?"
"Kind of." I wasn't going to admit to standing still, or going backward.
"OK. What I said was this, I couldn't be with you if you weren't a musician."
"It wasn't such a big deal to you at the time. You don't even like music that much."
"You're not hearing me, JJ. You're a musician. It's not just what you did. It's who you are. And I'm not saying you're going to be a successful musician. I don't even know if you're a good one. It was just that I could see you'd be of no use to anyone if you stopped. And look what happened. You break the band up, and five minutes later you're standing on the top of a tower block. You're stuck with it. And without it you're dead. Or you might as well be."
"So...OK. Nothing to do with being unsuccessful."
"God, what do you take me for?"
But I wasn't talking about her; I was talking about me. I never looked at it that way before. I thought this whole thing had been about my failure, but that wasn't it. And at that moment I felt like crying my fucking heart out, really. I felt like crying because I knew she was right, and sometimes the truth gets to you like that. I felt like crying because I was going to make music again, and I'd missed it so much. And I felt like crying because I knew that making music was never going to make me successful, so Lizzie had just condemned me to another thirty-five years of poverty, rootlessness, despair, no health plan, cold-water motels, and bad hamburgers. It's just that I'd be eating the burgers, not flipping them.

A Long Way Down ~ Nick Hornby

Some of us take what seems like an infinitely long time to figure out what seems like an obvious truth when stated so plainly. And it all sounds kind of tragic. But which is more tragic: a difficult life 'condemned' to some hardship so that you can do what you love, or a life spent chasing, and even achieving status, money and power just because you don't know what else to do?

Another question this particular excerpt generates is this: if there is something specific we are meant to do with our lives, is there someone specific we are meant to spend it with? And is there a comparable statistic, say 18%, of people who find their muse that also find their soulmate? Not that the 18% of those who have found their life's work have also found their life's partner (your karma would have to be pretty much perfect to manage that), just that the chances of hitting the jackpot in one of those areas is statistically about the same?

At the end of the book our hero had started busking in London tube stations and his ex-girlfriend did not take him back. (And that's not a spoiler because the book wasn't about that.) So he rediscovered -- and finally understood -- his raison d'etre ... but lost his other half.

Statistically speaking, he did OK.