On Thursday, my two youngest children (ages 18 and 21) and I went to see the new Top Gun movie. It was great. It wasn’t deep or meaningful or even gut wrenching. (The first Top Gun was a little gut wrenching. Goose’s death was honestly a little devastating in that movie.) Top Gun: Maverick was just fun and thrilling and action-packed and entertaining and perhaps even a little self-deprecating.
It’s fun to watch my young adult children’s appreciation of the things that marked my own coming of age in the 1980s. They loved the Top Gun movie and they even loved the original, which they watched before we went to go see the new one. I’ve even heard a few of my own teenage boom box favorite songs, playing on their playlists, and they think that Winona Ryder is just terrific. (albeit as the mom in Stranger Things)
My generation, Gen X, throughout the years has often been portrayed as angsty and aimless and forgotten, but when I am reminded of what Gen X has brought into being, from a cultural sense, I see the fun, and the lightness, and the goofiness, and the “go with the flow” which has marked our generation. I see a timeless, unapologetic, “chilled out” individualism that is so attractive in these times of constant judgment and aggravation amongst different groups of people. These days we are so busy shifting blame, assigning shame, and putting labels on everybody and everything, that we forget that life is mostly supposed to be an amazing adventure to be experienced without definitions. Sometimes, it’s important to just sit back, and take a fun, meaningless ride on the “Highway to the Danger Zone.”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.