2/25: The Big Wheel
Prisoner of fate, victim of circumstance... or not.
Well, I was only a kid—didn’t know enough to be afraid.
Playing the game, but not the way the big boys played,
Nothing to lose—maybe I had something to trade.
For a long time—until Vapor Trails came out—Roll the Bones was my favorite Rush album. All the concepts covered in the album—probability, circumstance, the Problem of Evil, making your own fate—well, Teenage!Lara soaked up all these heady concepts like a sponge and built a personality around them for decades to come.
“The Big Wheel” spoke to me from the get-go. The song both is and isn’t about faith—“Take no chances on paradise delayed” can refer to an actual Heaven, of course, but also any promise at the end of the rainbow, whether it’s that vacation you’ll never take or the job you’ll never leave or the ice cream sandwich in the freezer you’ll never eat. “Paradise delayed” is, at its core, the constant cycle of delayed gratification we fall into; and how we’ll dangle what we want just out of our reach to keep ourselves going.
I don’t wait well. I never have. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at hiding it, but the impulse to just go already is always there, boiling just under the surface. I’ve always tried to put that impatience to good use by chasing the opportunities I want and seizing them with both hands. Maybe that’s a terribly hedonistic way to live, but I’d rather take a single step in the right direction every day for a year than wait a year for the right moment to run an entire marathon.
But there is a metaphysical element to it, too. I’m sort of ambivalent on the concept of an afterlife—if there is or isn’t a Heaven or Hell, well, it doesn’t seem like I could have any proof or evidence for either way. In any case, I certainly don’t believe in working your tail off to reach some far-off paradise that’s only accessible—maybe—after you die. Like the narrator of “The Big Wheel,” I believe that what matters is here and now. It’s all we ever truly have for sure. And it’s enough.