The other day, just after we said goodbye to another decade and it became 2020, I turned 50. We survived, we are here and so now what? Also, where did that half of a century go?
After 50 times around the sun, it feels a bit like being in the middle of everything while pausing at a place with an expansive view, like when driving up a mountain and resting at a designated lookout point. You stop to take a deep breath and soak it all in; through the haze you see where you have been, where you are and, with some hesitation and squinting, where you are going.
Google maps don’t work here; you’re on your own for this trip. Might as well pocket the phone, too. As omnipresent as smartphones are, at times, they’re only a 185-gram paperweight.
Long-term addiction and other mental and behavioural conditions push you into self-destructive places where experiences are reduced to neurochemical attempts to cover pain: physical, mental or maybe spiritual.
Life can drift away from any balance and become disconnected from authentic things and feelings. However, you can teach an old dog new tricks.
New developments in neuroscience show evidence of neuroplasticity. To oversimplify, changes in behaviour will result in physical changes in our brain. At that point, perception can change reality into a better place. It only matters that change is a constant we can have influence over.
At this point, for me, a primary take away idea is how stunningly brief everything is, and how that brevity makes every moment an invaluable but fleeting thing. Lately, time seems to be accelerating and it’s starting to be an exponential thing. Somehow, it’s important to appreciate the moment while within that moment, because it’s gone quickly.
It all sounds confusing and kind of bewildering, mostly because it is, to me at least.
Along the way, some thoughts or ideas stuck to me and got woven into my thoughts and values. They are trying to teach me something, if I listen.
A passage from The Sheltering Sky, a novel by American writer Paul Bowles, who spent most of his life in Tangier, Morocco, has been in my head lately. Bowles writes with a concise elegance:
“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.”
Thinking that life is limitless and an “inexhaustible well” can become a default position easily enough. It takes effort to realize all the potentially amazing moments that construct life are finite and will disappear like raindrops into the ocean unless we appreciate life in the moment, and then the trip really begins. For me, at least.
Robert Skender is a Powell River freelance writer and health commentator.
