A lifetime is such a strange,  amorphous designation, is it not? We tend to refer to it as though it were a universally fixed quantity, not fully-guaranteed but certainly entitled-to. Perhaps hopefully,  perhaps naively, the measurement is bandied about to conjure the decrepitude of old age as subtle contextualization for our supposedly very long sojourn on this side of the grass but we don’t actually know when we’ll fall down into that pothole. What a wonderous example something so vague yet so clear.  A lifetime can quite literally not be shortchanged because it so satisfyingly unambiguous in its rigid definition. That we struggle with the joke because the punchline isn’t revealed until the listner is no longer around to hear it (presumably. Grandpa, make the lights flicker if that’s not true) makes it all the more deliciously apropos.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t think it more likely that I’d expire early from self-harm than reach the pruney years. There have been some periods of my life as yet in which that danger felt incredibly imminent but even outside of those–and dating back into early teenagedome at least–it just seemed like kind of an obvious truth for me. You might understand why this perspective would lend me a skewed rendering of the meaning of a word like lifetime in comparison to the way many others might hold it in their minds. If anything,  the same is even moreso true for the concept of middle age.  I mean,  in my own mind I’ve felt well past middle age for decades now,  because who the hell thought I’d make it into my 40s?? Well,  presumably most people but certainly not this one. 

I’m not saying I hold expectations of lasting into my 90s but let’s lean into this long term vision. By any commonly-shared metric, I am absolutely into my middle age. And I almost feel it, too. Not in the doom and gloom of oh my god I’m almost 41 and I’m getting old and…look! I have white hairs in my beard!! but in that of late I have perceived a marked shift into a more mature mindset. What I mean is that for many, many years (decades, in fact) I continued to feel as though I was positioning and repositioning to *start* my life. Any day now, the thinking went, I would find the right mix of this and that and my story would begin. I’m slower than most, quite evidently, but at 40 I’ve backed into latent acceptance that this is life. And maybe maturity is the wrong moniker to apply, perhaps the effect is merely of no longer feeling so electrically the audacity of youth. I still think pretty highly of myself, but I don’t live with the palpable expectation that at any minute I’m going to change the world. Is that maturity or just losing steam?

Because in contrast, for all intents and purposes I’m still a child. A man-child at one’s most generous, perhaps, but certainly not a human adult capable of human adult things. I recently had occasion to leave reality for a spell, lost in the swirl of a romance the kind that might revisit a dying nanogenarian in hospice, pulling up the corners of his mouth into a smile that defies the spent decades, the morphine, the damn cancer itself. It was a romance both remarkable and unremarkable; after all, its very episodic nature is bullseye to my wheelhouse n’est ce pas?. What else is my identity possibly comprised of if not such unsustained bursts of dizzied energies? The whirlwind’s resolution was, well, resolved in a manner incongruously cut-and-dried. Though I am quite skilled at losing my head and pledging this or that and treating people and places as a vacation spot (I immerse myself, I consume, and then simply walk away once my imagination wanders) I submit that that doesn’t smack of an adult’s behavior. It certainly isn’t the type of behavior that another adult, with young children and a rooted life can afford to entertain. A quick review of my life’s CV provided zero evidence to sustain even a feebly passing argument in contrary. So.

Perhaps that’s a resume I’m interested in fleshing out, however. At my best, I do feel very middle aged. I never thought to plan for another handful of decades beyond where I’m at, but I admit that the possibility of allowing for some root-growth holds a certain allure from this vantage point. Because the grass does look oh so very green over there. So maybe the sliding scale measurement of a lifetime isn’t only here to help us delude ourselves into what we’re owed–maybe there’s a certain hope to it as well that I hadn’t appreciated. It is an existential carrot, if you will. My lifetime, as of yet, reads as consistent in its churlish inconsistency. My lifetime as viewed by the nonogenarian me in hospice? What a heretical proposition…maybe I’ll let you know.

But that leads to an alarming question: as a middle-aged man, should I be having fun? And I don’t mean by accident, I mean on purpose. Sure, laugh if you want but I contend that it isn’t as straight forward as your guffaw implied. Isn’t the concept of fun superficial by nature?  Furthermore, I can’t say that it is necessarily preclusive of, but fun most certainly doesn’t seem to easily beget cousin-concepts like gratification, fulfillment, or contentedness. And I know that collectively we embrace an admonishment on society that a dying human never regrets working less but the other side of that coin is that for whatever shade of gratification living for the moment emenates, it sure is ephimeral. I have decades of supposed life experiences that I can’t even recall, let alone feel or build upon.

With this, my sailboating continues. Pacific Mexico of Colima, Jalisco, and Michoacan. It is an existence centered on small, menial tasks in a series of outrageously beautiful environments. I might pass an entire morning rowing jugs of fresh water to and fro my boat. I walked 20km round trip to buy watermelons the other day–I didn’t have to but I wanted to. A few hours a week diving to scrape/clean the bottom of the boat. Sisyphus is never far from my mind, usually with some weird form of nostalgia attached. The other day someone asked me to name my favorite part of living on a sailboat. After appropriate hesitation I ventured that it allows me the gratification of suffering menially while allowing those on the outside to imagine me as pursuing paradise. They didn’t laugh but, then again, I wasn’t joking. Two truths existing in blessed symbiosis.