My ideal life

It's funny. My dreams for myself have both changed and stayed the same in so many ways from when I was 18.

When I was 18 and just beginning school at my alma mater, Wichita State University, I had two major goals.

To be a good dad. And to gain wisdom.

Not to terribly shabby goals for an 18-year-old, I don't think, looking back. Some pretty fine goals, actually, I think. I'm proud of that kid.

Today, my ideal life would look like this.

I'd like to teach with young people of all ages - middle school, high school, university level, and even elementary school, if I could get the opportunity though I lack the credentials, currently - and write somewhere with plenty of freedom to do both without all the pressures and limitations of departmental and school politics and with as little intrusion by other pressures, from the state and elsewhere, as possible. I'm all about openness and engaging others, inside and outside the places I work. But I want it to be as respectful and decent and intellectually honest as possible. Meaning, we can disagree as much as we agree, and noone gets their arm twisted over it.

I'd like to teach and write where I have maximum freedom to just do the best job I know how. Noone does everything well all the time. I just want to do my best job, make my best judgments, and to deal as little as possible with the pressures bearing to compromise those essential responsibilities of teaching and writing as little as possible.

I'd like to make enough money to be comfortable. And I wouldn't mind people reading my books and maybe speaking with people about my ideas, sometimes.

I'd like to fall in love with someone who makes my heart flutter and makes me want to collapse when she is gone (one day both of us will be gone for one another, no matter how well our lives together turn out). I want to raise children with her and get old with her and still feel passionately in love and feel total respect and admiration for her while we raise our children, even as I learn and know about all her flaws and mistakes and more humble qualities. I'd like to have a little house and pay for it, maybe a house my family built if I end up settling in the Wichita area, and stick with it for awhile, maybe. I'd like to be my ideal image of John Dreifort - a history professor at Wichita State that I never had but who raised a fine son in Darren Dreifort, the young pitcher for the Wichita State Shockers then L.A. Dodgers - raising a good kid, doing good work, and living a good life, humbly and as well as I can doing good with the life that I have.

I'd like to live a good life and be proud of it.

That's my ideal life. Falling in love is key to that life, since being in love, for real, is the most beautiful feeling I've ever experienced in my life and the one I'd most like to repeat.

That'd be a nice life. I could love a life like that.

Love,
Ben