I am very seriously working on my new balance as a man approaching 50 years of age. It feels very much like relenting.
I explain it to myself as I do about the fact that shortly my son will be taller than I. I allow him to eat more, first. I'm letting women and their children ahead of me in line at the airport even though I know that they will waste my time. Other times I allow for the recognition of the possibility that I have already achieved my greatest accomplishment and that it is all downhill from this point forward.
At the same time, I feel very much like the older man on the racquetball court who knows where the ball is going to go before it gets there. Without sweating and appearing lazy, he steps into position and makes his precise swing, conserving the energy, sweat and huffing noises that emanate like fire from the younger man. I'm efficient in my tactics.
It goes against the American meritocratic sense of self-promotion, the content sort of containment. It is like knowledge in the hands of a priest, or of a spy. The inverse relationship to progress is established. You don't spout off about what you know to make yourself a success. Instead you conserve it. In this way I am not relenting.
I don't look as attractive, I think, with my hair grown out. My new glasses feel like something of a disguise. I wear the flat front pants and oxford shirts without ties with the collars still buttoned - like I'm halfway somewhere. I actually feel like I'd be more comfortable with the tie, except that perhaps it would make me look too impressive.
I'm trying to draw down the number of contacts on my phone, and synced them the wrong way yesterday. I had deleted over 800 and now they are back, and the 50 I had updated have lost their updates. I was trying to get rid of everyone outside of California, but now their ghosts have returned to haunt my electronics sometimes in double and triple entries. I want to be an old man focused, and I know what I need to do, it's just a matter of managing my time, shedding weight and pushing other energetic wastes aside. I had been collecting, but now the weight of that ambitious collection of names and notions has weighed me down.
The young man stays up all night with strangers, consummates an affair - a fusion made out of excess momentum in a club made for enhancing collisions of superheated random social motions - and disgorges the excess fluids. But the glass is only half full because the glass is two times too large. It is no longer my aim to live large, but to live precisely. I don't want to retire, I want to repair clocks and tend to vegetables. To have a laboratory of a kitchen and to invent sauces, soups and sangrias.
Last night I watched Rashomon for the first time. What impressed me most was the pace of single combat, seeing it from multiple angles. If you had all day to save your life, how long would it take? We are accustomed to thinking of men killing each other in short periods of time, but what if a sword battle took an hour? What if it took 4 hours? How quickly are we exhausted and prepared to accept the consequences of a deadly mistake that took only 4 seconds to happen? What if we had to sit, bound and helpless, and watch our lives destroyed before us? How quickly would we lose ourselves? How thoroughly would we be transformed?
I have grown my hair, dropped politics and commentary, moved from one house to another and secured a contract that has erased my fear of the economic crisis. Meanwhile I am plotting an even more ambitious project. Yet I feel as though I am moving more slowly and deliberately than ever. I hope that I am growing precise, that I am shedding pretense.
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