(which is admittedly tacky of me! I went to lunch yesterday with my old friend J, fully intending to pick up the check myself - when she grabbed it instead, I thanked her kindly & thought to myself, well that’s payback for all those text messages last week - “free veterinary consultation”, don’t **I** work cheap?!?)
Alternative title would’ve been “can’t get no satisfaction”, which I know I’ve also used not too long ago… Lunch was supposed to be a dual venting/cope session about our young adult children - it’s no joke that my son & J’s daughter suffered severe harm during our tumultuous divorce & custody battles. I think that’s why Z is “settling for less” in his marriage (desperate not to fail) while A talks about having “closure” with her ex-boyfriend who strangled her, beat their dogs & threatened to kill them all (he was convicted of felony assault, did a token amount of jail time & is now out in the free world again). While I don’t think the answer lies completely with J’s solution to push her out into the dating world, A does need to know there are some decent men out there…
Running short on time so I’ll post a link to previous history w/J, & this morning’s thought-provoking essay from “some dude on FB”:
https://endurovetssparkjourney.blogspot.com/2023/08/quantum-physics-fairytales.html
AT 58, I DO NOT THINK THE FRIGHTENING PART OF AGEING IS DEATH. IT IS DISCOVERING HOW MUCH OF LIFE CAN BE SPENT IN THE WAITING ROOM WITHOUT ANYBODY EVER CALLING YOUR FUCKING NAME.
A Gen X discussion this week asked when people first felt “the shift”.
One line stayed with me:
The clock had been running the whole time.
That is it.
Not a sudden terror of grey hair. Not buying a motorbike and trousers with an optimistic waist measurement. Not waking up one morning desperate to climb a mountain, find yourself or start using the word “journey” while gazing meaningfully across a lake.
It is the quieter recognition that time was not paused during all those years spent earning, fixing, carrying, recovering and telling yourself the real part would begin once the current load eased.
We were not waiting to start life.
That was life.
Another discussion described modern life as one long string of putting out fires.
Work problem. Family problem. Money problem. Health problem. Roof problem. Car problem. Phone problem. A password problem created by a security system designed to protect the account you can no longer fucking enter.
There is always something demanding attention, and most of it arrives pretending to be urgent.
You deal with Monday so you can reach Friday. You get through this month because next month should be quieter. You delay the walk, the visit, the phone call, the trip, the book and the thing you have wanted to learn until life becomes more manageable.
Then another fire starts.
Put enough fires in a row and they become a life.
I understand load. I have carried enough of it, created some of it and occasionally tried to extinguish it with things that were quietly pouring petrol around the edges.
There were years when almost everything became maintenance. Keep working. Keep earning. Keep the plates spinning. Keep functioning well enough that nobody asked the question I did not want to answer.
When my own system finally broke, it was not because one enormous thing had landed on me. It was the accumulated weight of grief, isolation, unstable work, debt, poor sleep, alcohol, shame and the constant effort required to appear as though I was still managing it.
That is what load does. It rarely announces itself with a brass band and a formal declaration that you are now overwhelmed. It occupies the available space, one reasonable demand at a time, until survival has pushed everything else out of the room.
What I no longer believe is that life will eventually clear a polite space and invite us to begin.
There is no administrative end point at which every bill is settled, every relationship repaired, the body works perfectly, the house is finished, the inbox is empty and nobody needs anything from you.
Nobody is coming through the door with a clipboard to announce that you have successfully completed your responsibilities and may now start enjoying yourself.
If you wait for zero load, you will die with a beautifully organised list of reasons you never went.
That does not mean abandoning your responsibilities to “follow your joy” because a man beside an infinity pool has explained abundance while somebody else cleans his fucking kitchen.
Somebody still has to feed the dog, answer the letter, book the appointment, check the bank account and put the bins out.
The mortgage company remains stubbornly resistant to positive affirmations.
It means refusing to let maintenance occupy the entire map.
We have been trained to treat living as something we earn after completing everything else. Rest comes after the work. Enjoyment comes after the jobs. Connection comes after the emails. The thing that matters comes after the thing that shouts loudest.
Except the jobs breed overnight, the emails reproduce when nobody is looking and there is always another administrative bastard waiting behind the one you have just defeated.
You cannot complete life’s maintenance.
You can only decide how much territory you are prepared to surrender to it.
An hour outdoors is not a failed expedition because you did not summit anything or post a photograph from the top.
Cooking something properly is not wasted time because it did not become content, generate income or demonstrate personal growth.
Calling somebody is not less important than clearing another notification.
Learning, walking, laughing, cooking, making something, sitting with someone you love and occasionally doing something for no defensible reason whatsoever are not rewards issued after life has been completed.
They are the fucking life.
The cruel trick is that the things we postpone are often the things that would have helped us carry the load in the first place.
We remove movement because we are busy. We sacrifice sleep because there are jobs to finish. We stop seeing people because we do not feel like good company. We eat whatever is quickest because we are exhausted. We abandon curiosity because it cannot justify its place on the spreadsheet.
Then we wonder why the system feels increasingly brittle.
This is not an argument for pretending consequences do not exist. Some people are carrying brutal loads with very little choice about the matter. Money, caring responsibilities, illness, grief and survival cannot be solved by booking a pottery class and purchasing a motivational water bottle.
But even under real pressure, the question remains:
Has the load taken everything, or is there still one part of your life that belongs to you?
Not eventually.
Not when work calms down.
Not when the children need less.
Not when the body is different, the bank balance is healthier or the house finally looks like the one in your head.
Now.
At 58, I am not interested in pretending the clock is not running.
I am interested in no longer helping it rob me.
I have postponed enough of my life in the belief that there would be a cleaner, easier and more appropriate time to live it. Experience suggests that time is a fictional administrative department with no staff and a telephone nobody answers.
So I will deal with the fires that need dealing with.
I will carry what is mine to carry.
But I will not spend the rest of my life sitting obediently in the waiting room, clutching a numbered ticket while the clock keeps moving and nobody calls my fucking name.
What have you postponed for long enough?
Name one thing you refuse to push into another year
