Dylan’s Self-Awareness

The New Yorker’s latest edition (August 29, 2022) published profiles they’d first published long ago, including one by the late Nat Hentoff from 1964 of Bob Dylan, 23 at the time, and already recognized as a new, incisive voice. 

Among the things Hentoff illuminated is that Dylan ran away from home seven times––at ten, at twelve, at thirteen, at fifteen, at fifteen and a half, at seventeen, and at eighteen.  What Dylan was able to articulate about all that at 23, two years older than I (with my own run away saga), took me until about the day before yesterday.  

“I kept running because I wasn’t free,” Dylan said.  “I was constantly on guard.  Somehow, way back then, I already knew that parents do what they do because they’re up tight.  They’re concerned with their kids in relation to themselves.  I mean, they want their kids to please them, not to embarrass them––so they can be proud of them.  They want you to be what they want you to be.  So I started running when I was ten.  But always I’d get picked up and sent home.  When I was thirteen, I was traveling with a carnival through upper Minnesota and North and South Dakota, and I got picked up again.  I tried again and again, and when I was eighteen, I cut out for good.  I was still running when I came to New York.  Just because you’re free to move doesn’t mean you’re free.  Finally, I got so far out I was cut off from everybody and everything.  It was then I decided there was no sense in running so far and so fast when there was no longer anybody there.  It was fake.  So I stopped.  I’ve got no place to run from.  I don’t have to be anyplace I don’t want to be.  But I’m by no means an example for any kid wanting to strike out.  I mean, I wouldn’t want a young kid to leave home because I did it, and then have to go through a lot of the things I went through.  Everybody has to find his own way to be free.  There isn’t anybody who can help you in that sense.  Nobody was able to help me….”

Even as a kid I knew I would be a late bloomer, that it would take me a while to get a handle on what was what.  Life was just too mysterious, and every form of the worldly world I met offered direction that was, at best, incomplete in satisfying the call of my heart that made saint my earliest career goal, one I’d been working on for many lives, I’m sure. 

My number one response to every request or demand to fit in was “No!”  Some of those “no’s” were screamed.  One was changing my name.  Biology is not destiny I was saying.  You may expect nothing of me except what I willingly give from my heart I was saying.  My parents labeled me dead. 

It took decades to feel the divine gift of it all: to realize that the God I was pursuing could be found only within myself.  And that saying no to everything else can be done lovingly with gratitude for the ever-present choice of love or fear.

Dylan’s self-awareness at 23 can be all the more noteworthy when we consider how many lifetimes, and how much pain, it can take to even entertain the notion that we are responsible for our every response to life.  That how we define our world actually creates our world.