Dream Chasers

“Dream chasers they call ’em…” 

His eyes were electric as he said this – darting pupils dancing like black lightning in the deep milky-blue sea of his irises.  He seemed to pause for a moment as if in contemplation, an almost imperceptible tremulous excitement shooting out from his fingertips before he finished the sentence in a gruff whisper. 

“…they change the world.” 

Tom sat on the rickety old metal folding chair, his knees bent and feet hovering over the stained rug like ancient dead things.  His hair was a silver mane that eclipsed a rugged beard whiter than snow.  All of us kids sat in our normal circle as he led our group for that day.  I was seventeen years old and in my first rehab – still full of youthful spit and fire.  Like everyone else, I didn’t want to be there.  But Tom sure helped to pass the time.  And I liked Tom, that being said was almost a remarkable feat in itself.  He was the only counselor that I had any respect for.  Because he got it.  He just had a way about him that put you at ease and emanated a deep knowing. 

To put it bluntly, he had a presence. 

And the other counselors just didn’t get it.  Sure, they qualified and had done their fair share of drugs.  But they didn’t know how to relate to kids.  They all thought they did, but they were only fooling themselves.  Kids have a way of knowing things.  Once you’ve been through enough trauma and therapy you develop this six sense about you.  You learn to read people in a heartbeat and cut through the bullshit. 

But Tom was different. 

There was this air about him like he didn’t give a fuck, and it was attractive.  As if there was a sharp edge underneath it all that seemed to beckon a hidden story, yet if you pushed too hard then you’d get cut.  He was an old timer, yet young in his bones.  He didn’t always follow the rules and you could tell that he was playing a different kind of game when he was around you. 

It was like he was on a different level and I couldn’t figure out how to transcend. 

“Time for break,” he said. 

He had just wrapped up one of his stories from running Heroin in the sixties.  “Dream chasers,” he had called them.  Some rogue hippies taking matters into their own hands and carving out their own version of reality from the world. 

And man, they were some fucking wild stories.  He’d keep them relatively tame in group but when we were let out for smoke break, one on one, he’d let shit fly. 

All of us kids stood in a semi-circle out back, lighting up our cigarettes and sucking down that seductive smoke as if we were dragons among men.  Nicotine and Caffeine were all that we had now, and that wasn’t much.  We were all underage, but they still let us smoke – at least they gave us that.  What had the world come to if you couldn’t even fire up a cigarette anymore? 

Eventually Tom rolled outside and sat down on the stone wall next to us.  I moseyed on up to him while he watched me from the corner of his eyes. 

We had in interesting relationship, Tom and I.  Kind of like a push and pull or yin and yang, and I was still trying to figure out where the boundaries laid. 

“What do you want Q-FI?”  He asked me – in that slow, methodical, contemplative drawl of his; no annoyance, only understanding – as he was fishing his smokes out of his pocket. 

(I need to interject here that Tom smoked these crazy… I struggle to even explain what they were.  Because they were a cross between cigarettes and cigars but without a filter.  The best way I can describe them is they looked like a swisher sweet cigar but with the filter cut off.  And these things literally smelled and tasted like shit.  I’ve probably smoked most drugs known to man on this Earth, but when he offered me one and I inhaled I coughed my brains out.  Tom got a good laugh out of that one.  And his smokes played right into his allure – you had to be one crazy mother fucker to huff and puff those things day in and day out!) 

Tom and I small talked for a while before I brought up his story in group. 

“You miss it,” I asked.  “The freedom and using back in the day I mean?  That was the dream, right?” 

He paused and gave me a long scrutinizing look.  A billow of smoke poured out of his mouth as he answered slowly, “No.”  His blue eyes had a hardness to them, they could do that sometimes.  Cut you right down to size like chiseled ice.  “You missed the point Q-FI,” and he cocked his head and leveled his gaze as if he could see right into me.  “Today is the dream.  There’s nothing I can’t do.  I surf in the morning.  Helipad snowboard if I really want to in the afternoon and I’m past seventy.  I… I finally found my true freedom… and that’s the dream.” 

His cigarette crackled bright orange as he took another impressive drag, inhaling the carcinogens deeply as if they were oxygen itself.   I didn’t like his answer, no… I didn’t like his answer one bit.  But he didn’t leave me much choice. I had to ask.  “How do I get there?” 

He smiled and the warmth returned to his hollow features.  But the smile wasn’t for me.  It was a smile for the all others that had asked that same question before and had to learn the answer the hard way.  It was also for himself, in a way… you could say. 

“It’s simple,” he eventually put forth, like he was offering me something valuable that I didn’t understand.  And there was no chastisement in his tone, only truth.  “You stay sober…  But you haven’t figured that out yet Q-FI.”  He slowly shook his head back and forth like a disappointed father scolding a child.  “No… No, you haven’t figured that out at all yet Q-FI.   So, keep searching for your own dream… because it’s out there somewhere.” 

He slowly reached down and put out the butt of his cigarette in the ashtray and then glanced back up at me with those knowing eyes one last time.  They bore into me like a drill, but there was a sadness lingering there, before he turned away and walked back inside. 

Leaving me alone… leaving me with myself. 

— 

The other day I was thinking back about my first rehab and Tom, and his story from group was caught in my head.  There’s a lot of parallels between addiction and FI that I have touched upon in the past.  But it all boils down to freedom – one is being free from chemical slavery and the other is freedom from life constraints.  Yet in the big picture, aren’t they one and the same? 

“Dream chasers he called ’em…” 

(now this might be the first, and only, FI post you ever read that compares Heroin runners in the sixties to financial independence, but hey, no one ever said you had to achieve FI legally, right?  Hahaha.  And we don’t judge on this blog… to each their own.) 

Dream chasers.  I like that name.  I always have.  It makes my mind drift with the possibilities. 

And isn’t that what we have become in FI… dream chasers?  People bending reality to their whim in order to change the rules?  In pushing the boundaries, we are writing a new script… the script of a misplaced lifetime and past bygone worlds reborn in the present. 

Because who wrote the rules?  And aren’t rules made to be broken?  Because there are always exceptions? 

So where do you fit in on the spectrum? 

I know where I do.  Somewhere far off from what America likes to call normal.  Yet, that’s not my reality.  That’s not who I am today.  Today, I’m just like the rest of us, putting my head down to the grindstone and planning for that distant horizon where reveries and actuality intertwine into shaping my prelude for tomorrow.  

Because the dream is out there still, calling my name.  And it’s a dream of freedom… in which we become peddlers of beginnings… rather than endings. 

-Q-FI 

— 

P.S.  Is pursuing FI like chasing a dream?  What is/was it like for you?  Have you ever had a dream come true?