For the first time a couple weeks ago, I happened to grab some skin on my thigh and I was able to pinch more than ever. More than I've ever noticed before. It was kind of a shock, because I don't feel frail. But perhaps it's time to admit that I'm looking down one of the last tunnels. I think for the first time I'm beginning to think of looking to lower the river instead of building a mightier bridge. It's a weird notion, and almost foreign to me.
The first time I ever got laid off was in 2001. It was a landmark year for everyone. I was to turn 40 that year and was dealing with tax and custody problems. It was the first time in my life where I considered the possibility that my best days might be behind me. They weren't, but it took about three years of risk to get all the rewards. I began to recognize the kind of desperate ferocity that I saw in others as they pursued their careers. I looked towards my feet and saw the space below like the gaps in the floors of a fire escape to the hard pavement 10 floors down. I was at something of a dizzy height, not in absolute terms, but relative to where I had been before. Of course people say 40 is when you are 'over the hill', and that kind of joke has its currency for a while. But it was a fact that I had achieved technical mastery of the tools I had used to fuel my career, and now people were just building newer ones and calling them next generation. It's a different perspective when the leading edge moves away from you and you're not really impressed.
So many things have happened in the intervening 18 years. I feel greatly expanded. I feel capable of handling so much more bad news and so much more triumph. I have gone from a small balloon to a large one, where before I needed helium to rise, now I only need hot air. Where before, I could be popped by one prick (and I've met my share of pricks) now it takes a determined axe to take me down. Of course I'm a bigger target with large bright colors. Some might even say graceful and majestic. Some might say full of gas with no particular direction.
I think what I recognize this year that makes the most sense is that there is always a great deal more reality to face than we might like. It's always out there, and when you keep your head down with the assumption that your feet are headed in the right direction, there's always the chance that change has overtaken your attention. Yet you can always raise your head and adjust course. There are always landmarks you can identify. There are always distances you can measure. So long as you keep your boots on, you can get on a profitable trail.
I have the advantage of watching men and women who are senior to me, as well as those younger. It is pleasant to watch the young become bold as the old make accommodations for their shrinking ambitions. I have discovered how much I feel that I have lived a gratifying life and how that gratification leaves me disposed to be honest and reassuring. Several years ago I assumed the position of asshole who was not anti-social but anti-bullshit. I know how that can be inspiring. I know how that can be dangerous. The truth serves no one, except perhaps those whose appreciation is done at a distance. So often we end up rewarding courage posthumously. Who wants to take the time to raise their heads and try to be objective when the strategy, money, glory and patience is headed away from the truth? I suppose only the honest man who knows the value of honest work and is so dedicated. That is what I have been doing, with consistency. I am conscientious. But I am also open to new experience.
It is new experience that has added volume to my ballooning skin. Over the past three years I have dealt with chaos and frailty in my job and my family and finally in myself. Right now I am in the middle of a pace that doesn't feel like courage so much as it feels like facing that which I refused to deal with as I might have. A couple years ago I took pictures of myself after dental surgery, and didn't mind so much that I looked ridiculous. I few years ago I realized that 'good genes' were not enough to keep me going - when I found myself panting going up two flights of stairs. It was and remains difficult for me to distinguish between what I do to make myself useful and make myself happy. I realize those are both my responsibility and that I shouldn't abandon either as one reinforces the other even when I cannot prioritize either. That confusion has landed me in bed with anxiety and depression; two sides of the same black dog. Yet purpose remains. So in this moment, I have a kind of joyless purpose. It is joyless partly because of the medications I am taking and partly because I acknowledge that my purpose cannot end. I will die trying something. I will die trying something. And so I feel capacious. I can handle more pain without yelling. I can answer more questions without yelling. I can do a lot more without passion. It is good to be king, but it doesn't feel good. It feels like you must always say we, because you encompass more than just your own life. You must move forward and pull everyone forward with you, or at least shout out the direction. That right now is the meaning of my life.
My youngest is now in Spain, finishing off the last credits of her university education. My children are neither brilliant or impressively ambitious, but they are all good people. They're the kind of people you want to be around. They are the kind of people who appreciate life. Despite my inadvertent spoiling of them all, they get it. They are grateful and they are excellent company. I am impressed by their willpower. They are hardheaded bulldogs. So I have been giving myself credit for having done the father thing well, and it is, such as it is, that accomplishment for which I am completely satisfied to call my greatest. I know now that I am exactly human whereas I thought I might never be ordinary. I finally saw that dramatic presentation that convinced me that I would not abstract any good from denial of my earthly loves. Any terrorist brute could compromise any secret I know if my family were threatened. I'm OK with that, because I might survive to take revenge. I only pledge so much allegiance to any flag.
Today, having studied more psychology than I ever expected, I am accepting of the fact that I don't know myself as accurately as I expected to. That is because I am open to experiences I never expected to be. It has not been sufficient for me to remain true to one course in life. I have turned left and right; I have turned it up and calmed it down. I have gone full force. I have shutdown completely. I've always said that a little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing. I realize it is Buddha's Nothing, it is everything and nothing at once. So now I am almost ambivalently large. I am yet so satisfied to have the integrity of the moment and to string those moments together. That is how I remain myself, as contradictory as it seems. To allow myself to be open to the new and the different. It's not, as David Bowman said, "full of stars". It's full of humans. I'm sure that I know humans better than I know stars. So I'm well disposed to know all the humans I might become, depending upon what circumstances the planet and stars may throw my way.
What's changing about me is my willingness, yet again, to presume I have so much to tell people. I'm not carrying a message. I'm carrying, if anything, a habit of being perceptive and articulate. So I am carrying the context of myself, sloughing off my own skin as I am dragged through life. Perhaps not only should I stop writing 'objectively' but stop reading. After all, what is it that I really want to know? I want to do that which I think needs doing in my own field of endeavor, and I only need to know how. I am not challenged by the rest of life to name the passage in the Bible, or the stanza of Shakespeare, or the canto of Dante. I only have my worrisome curiosity and my expository habits. The arena is not noble or arcane. It is merely the stomping grounds of Fat Tony. I am not Maxiumus enslaved and I don't care if you are entertained. I'm just that pain in the ass who keeps parsing speech, making wry jokes, telling stories and analyzing. I can always stand a change of subject, but for now I don't seem to want to shut up. I'm still in the habit of free and mind-altering speech.
I watch violent fights. I read histories of battle. I immerse myself in the study of tragedy. I think I realize the bell tolls for me. Perhaps the random bomb will fall on my Bleak House, no matter how well I have fluffed the pillows and kindly tucked my charges into bed. I am stoic, perhaps properly Stoic, but I don't have or take every opportunity to show how. I merely live and leave this trail. I'm not sure if words are enough. So there will be video. Things I will be embarrassed to watch at some time in the future, perhaps. See me? That's my picture. Unlike the past two times, I am not in the dark. Life is a challenge at every level at all times for all days. I'm still standing. I suppose I may as well be poetic.
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