I am turning fifty-eight years old. It is a mildly disheartening feeling. That's forty years since I graduated from high school and the world seemed large and open and any direction seemed ripe for exploration. I, of course did none of that, I graduated from college, came back to my home town and never left. I did meet, fall in love with, coerce into marriage and reproduce with my favorite person ever, which softens that blow considerably, but still my life has been one long and continual settlement for the least amount of hassle. And now it is mostly over. The growing number of age related maladies and self inflicted sins of indulged, feigned ignorance are taking their toll. The death of friends, and contemporaries are now commonplace. Illnesses arrive in people I know like a lottery with an ever shrinking pool of numbers. My parents generation have shrunk to my mother in law, who sweetly struggles with her loss of memory, trying to valiantly hold on to what she can, and my own kind, sometimes mercurial mother who has given it up and now waits for a quiet exit while watching Filipino soap operas with the attendants. Fifty Eight seems old. Words and names seem to escape me. Thoughts which once came like a sprinter going downhill are plodding like walking in deep snow and mud. I partially blame the dopamine of the iPhone for it's faux pleasure in trivial information at your fingertips. I realize the internet is full of inspiring tales of people who do great things after their prime earning years. I know that there are amazing things still available to me. I know that I could be that person, but I also know I won't be. Some day I will wish I were this young again but all I can think of is that I wish I could do it over again with the perspective that I have now. The world that now takes shape upon waking in the morning no longer feels boundless. What is left feels broken and increasingly shabby, like a piece of carrion fought over by scavengers.
There is a certain disappointment here.
