Ten more days

Ten days left before becoming officially “not young anymore.” Yikes. I’m not happy about it, but a man has to keep moving along. Ten more bowls of cereal. Ten more walks around town. Ten thousand more thoughts bouncing around my skull, telling me things like “You should start journaling every day again”, and “You should start recording songs every week again”, and “You should carry a digital camera around and start taking pictures during your walks.” I suppose there’s really not much difference between taking a picture and recording a song and writing in a journal. It’s all about capturing the moment, putting a frame around it so it can be revisited later. But why do this? Why should I start doing any of these things? Am I trying to freeze time, to deny the inevitable? Ten days. It may as well be ten minutes, or ten seconds. As soon as I imagine the sand in the hourglass it’s already as good as gone. But while there’s nothing I can do to slow things down, I can pay closer attention. Better attention. And that’s really what I’m hoping will come of the journaling, the recording, the picture taking. Each of these activities focuses my attention in some way, tunes me in to some bandwidth of experience I habitually fail to notice. So yeah, it’ll probably do me some good to start doing these things more often. Still, I’m sad to turn forty. At this moment, I’m noticing the banana sitting on my desk—my mid-morning snack. It’s a bit past its prime, covered in brown spots. It’s not rotten mind you, not inedible, but still, it would have been tastier yesterday, or two days ago. In ten days, it’ll be rotten to the core. That is, unless I eat it today. If I eat it today I can spare everyone the stink and the fruit flies.

Now I know I’m not dead yet, that I’m healthy and likely to have many good years ahead of me, and that no one near forty (or older) wants to hear anything but positive spin when it comes to aging. Wisdom, and all that. But the brown spots are starting to show, and that fact means something to me. I’m not sure what it means, but I don’t want to gloss over it. I don’t want to turn away too quickly from the pangs of fear and wonder, from the slightly nauseating mysteriousness of it all. Birth, life, decay, death. Why not dwell on it a while? The times in my life that have been marked by the most personal growth have been those times when I’ve chosen not to turn away from uncomfortable feeling and thoughts. When I’ve stopped and turned toward what’s been nipping at my heels.

The last time I felt real terror was when I saw a man sneaking through the sliding glass door into my bedroom. It was about three in the morning, and it took me a moment to realize what was happening. When I finally realized a stranger has just broken into my home, I sprang up to my feet and, standing on the bed, I tried to scream. The sound that eventually came out of my mouth sounded like… well, I’m not really sure. Strangely, “a grizzly bear having an orgasm” is what comes to mind. Whatever it sounded like, it scared the doo-doo out of my wife, who had been snoozing soundly. In the end, the would-be burglar turned out to be my microphone stand, which I had set up a few days before. What does this has to do with turning forty? How the hell should I know? I’m only 39. For ten more days. But I’m guessing it has something to do with breaking the spell of illusion. Buddhists say our entire sense of self is an illusion. So who is it then, really, who’s turning forty? This physical organism? Scientists say that every cell in the human body is replaced every seven years, so that like a tornado or a whirlpool it’s really only the pattern that persists, not any particular object or thing. And everyone knows that each night we dream an entire universe into existence, only to forget about it before we’re done emptying our bladders the following morning.

Whoever “I” am, I was right about journaling. This is fun. But I was wrong about the banana. It turned out to be perfect. As far as taking pictures during my strolls through town, I’m not sure I have an eye yet for drawing out what’s most interesting: