An Existential Crisis Becomes a Plan for Longevity

 

For most of my life I had considered the day of my birth to be just another day of the year that came and went, even when the people that knew and cared for me insisted on celebrating in spite of my ambivalence.  I looked down my nose at those people who celebrated the birthday, for it was just another reason for the capitalists to find more ways to separate consumers from their hard earned money. And age. “Age was just another number” as they would say, although a societal construct that was all-to-often used to elevate certain members of our society to lofty strata while relegating those considered too young or too old to the shadows. I know it sounds like I may spouting some philosophical bullshit, but I swear that I’m telling you the truth. Those had been my thoughts on birthdays and aging, until I began to feel the onset of crisis as I became older.  

With age came many losses of the predictable and obvious kind, though still quite shocking. During my extremely late 30’s, my mind began to lose a bit of its edge. Instead of the memories “just coming to me” as they did when I was younger, I was reduced to foraging for them amidst a slight but persistent mind fog. My ability to process and interpret new information was compromised. My mood became more capricious with the passage of each day.

My body changed dramatically. The muscles that powered my body during my youth began to disappear, as did my pride in my body. And so putting my naked self before a bathroom mirror after a shower- a mirror which had been so flattering and kind to me for so many years- became a daily self-imposed cruel and unusual punishment exercise. After the horror at seeing what I had become subsided I would perform a personal lamentation for a stomach that had become soft and pudgy, a hairline that was almost no more, and a formerly robust testosterone that was beginning to wane.  Also, my knees cracked and popped in the mornings, and when the weather became cold all of my joints would suffer for it. All of sudden age wasn’t just a number for me anymore, for it brought about consequences that I had not foreseen, and my life was rapidly changing as result.  And then I arrived at forty, when the ground beneath me shifted a bit, throwing me off balance.

After turning forty, I was forced to face up to a fact of my life that was both stark and suddenly frightening: that it was probably more than half over if the statistics on life expectancy were true. It had happened as they said it would. My age had literally snuck up on me. Upon this realization I sat down to ruminate, and for hours performed a mental accounting of my life, and when finished I contracted a severe case of the nerves because of what this accounting had revealed to me: I hadn’t accomplished anything of real meaning since assuming the responsibilities that came with being a full-fledged adult.

In the midst of these reflections I wondered what my peers, most of whom had gone on to secure great careers and sire off-spring, would think of me now.  Those peers thought very highly of me when I was a youth.  I remember basking in the applause of a raucous group of hundreds of students as I climbed the stairs that led to the auditorium stage, where I would accept the recognition as the most likely to succeed from those same high school peers. Twenty-two years later I was 40 and still unmarried, saddled with a job that was not going anywhere, and I was questioning why the thought of purchasing my own home had never entered into my mind. The rungs of adulthood that I’d scoffed at for years became reasons for me to bemoan my lack of progress.

But what worried me the most was that I was about 30 or so years away from expiring. I was walking down the other side of the hill, and quickly approaching the dirt under which my body would be permanently reposed. Age wasn’t just a number anymore. It was made real.

And at 40, I was three years removed from having to watch my father pass away at 70 from a relatively rare form of cancer, and I still had not gotten over that horrific experience. My father’s encounter with death informed my expectation of what I could experience when my own time came.  And I was definitely not looking forward to the inevitable.

Of course I wanted to stave off the unavoidable for as long as I could. So as the New Year beckoned I made the resolution to increase the frequency of my visits to the gym and change my daily diet.  After two months of subsisting on my new diet and exercise regimen, a trip to my physician’s office provided the confirmation that I was hoping for: I was in really good health.  My blood pressure was normal, my pulse rate was steady, and I’d shed eight pounds of excess fat from my body. My abnormally large body felt svelte in clothes that were suddenly not so snug.  There was a bounce to my step, one that my doctor had noticed. Obviously impressed, the doctor offered a hearty congratulations for my accomplishments, which I enthusiastically accepted.  I became so filled with pride that I was near fit to burst with it, as the euphoria about my physical health crowded out the anxieties about my age.

I was in the process of gathering my things to leave the examination room when my doctor stopped me with a question. “Do you have any big plans for the coming year?” he asked.

And then the anxieties that had been relegated to the peripheries of my thoughts reclaimed their position at the forefront. These anxious feelings were not a response to a lack of planning and preparation for the upcoming years. Becoming 40 had suddenly made me very ambitious, and I had put together a bucket list of goals as a response to this ambition that was burning within me. It’s just that when I was forced to make my ambitions known to my friends and acquaintances I would contract a case of the nerves because publicizing my ambitions to friends and acquaintances creates expectations, and I didn’t like being burdened with other people’s expectations, for I greatly preferred the element of surprise.  I was the slow starting sprinter who liked to overtake the unsuspecting lead sprinter when coming around the last turn.

This doctor was taking the element of surprise away from me while saddling me with responsibility and expectation.  I knew that he was going to want a progress report the next time we saw each other.  And if my report fell short of what he had been expecting I would feel like I had let him down in some way. Beads of sweat formed and then trickled down my back and chest.  The pressure that I was so averse to was beginning to build.

“I’ll probably start writing a book, I think.  And I really want to find a new job… and get married this year,” I said with a shrug. 

I felt my stomach lurch, for it was suddenly full of poisonous regret.  Not because of what I said but because of how I said it. I went through my list of plans for the rest of my life like I would a grocery list, with absolutely no conviction.

The doctor nodded “That’s good,” he said. “So when do you plan to start? And what are you going to start with?”

“I’ve already started with the book and I’m in the midst of looking for a job right now.  I think I’ve got some time though.  I am 40, but 40 is not actually as old as it used to be.”

“Yes, that is true,” said the doctor. “But you are 40”.

I don’t like the way put that.

“You’re right.”

I resented him for implying it, but I did see his point.  Perhaps it was time that I come to terms with the fact that I was approaching middle age, and if I wanted to accomplish at least some of the goals that I’d set for myself I was going to have to start hustling a little more.  But the love of hustling is something that one is born with. It is in the blood of those who have it. These people thrive on always having something that always needs to be done. The hustlers that I knew seemed to like working the most after the sun goes down.  I coveted sleep after 9:00 pm in the evenings, and relished being able to relax with my two favorite companions: food and television while reclining on the living room couch after work and on the weekends. When I sat down to figure out how I would get started on all that it was that I needed to do, I wondered if it was possible for me to do it all because I knew that I was not the hustling kind.

People have been trying to inject a sense of urgency into me for as long as I could remember, but I could never fully accept the contents of the injection. The way I approached organized sports is a metaphor for how I approached life.  I played basketball as a teenager, and my father would watch me play the game while in the stands. But my father, the person who was most in my corner, criticized me for my lack of hustle on the basketball court during each game. But I like to think that the span of the basketball court is too short, and that it takes me longer than others to arrive at full speed.  I also ran track and field, a sport where a fast start was imperative for eventual success. My coach would repeatedly try to impress this point upon me. But as I’ve said before, I was always the last one to start, and often found myself in the position of trying to catch up to the front runner. It just takes me sometime before something within me clicks, propelling me forward.   Sometimes I was able to overtake the front runner, other times I would come up just short, although I’d made up a significant amount of the difference between the front runner and myself. If could not win then I was satisfied if I could make up a majority of the difference. Hustlers are not usually satisfied with making up the difference.

Something was clicking inside of me in the actual present: an existential crisis.  While in the midst of this crisis, my most pressing concern became the completion of the novel.  But after several attempts at trying to write into the wee hours of the night and failing-I caught myself dozing in my chair after only a few hours of writing each night after work- and after evaluating my current prospects for a writing career-editors were resoundingly rejecting my ideas for stories-I knew that I was probably going to need a lot more time than the 35 or so years that I had left. But how was I to accrue the extra time that I needed?  Time inexorably moves forward, bringing us closer to the long good-bye with the passing of each day.  Exercise and diet extends life by only a few years. And is a healthy lifestyle enough to protect the human body from life’s random occurrences?   

After a night of less than unsettled sleep, I awoke struggling with the question of how I would acquire more of a lifetime. Whilst walking by the list of goals that I’d pasted to my bedroom wall the idea struck me. Why not add another goal to the list that I’d already created and posted, one that would help to extend my time on this earth while giving me something to work towards. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for me to come up with the final and most important goal of them all: witness Halley’s Comet as it travels through its orbital path with my own two eyes.

I missed seeing the comet the last time it zoomed past earth in 1986.  How old was I then, 12, or maybe 13? I am too old to remember what I was doing the last time the comet came into view; however, I do recall that I was not a naturalist then, nor was I that interested in any kind of natural or scientific phenomena, and so the path traveled by some comet that I knew nothing about did not hold my interest at the time.  But at 40, my appetite for books and knowledge of all kinds-including science- was insatiable. I wanted to be able to map the constellations and recount the histories of the stars.  So seven years after completing a class in astronomy at the local community college, and with thoughts of Halley’s Comet on my mind, I took a trip down to the basement and began rummaging through boxes for the astronomy textbook that I’d kept from the class.

When I was able to find the book I was surprised at its appearance. Apart from the dust that coated the front and back covers, the book was in pristine condition. I spotted a chair that was situated in a corner of the basement.  While wiping away the dust from the book’s cover, I walked over to the chair and sat down to read; and after a few minutes of reading this book I was reminded of why I had abandoned it in the first place. Learning about space through the use of textbooks could still be a bit of chore.  The writing was dense and condensed, making it hard for my compromised eyesight to accommodate the text.  And the writing was as dry as my skin in the winter months, all flaky and scaly. So it was a really, really dry and boring book, replete with words that I did not recognize, which made it exceedingly difficult for me to understand the text I came across. As I did when I was reading Shakespeare, I had to constantly interrupt my reading with searches for the definitions of esoteric words and phrases, which did increase my composition; but the pace of my reading slowed to a crawl. I spent two hours reading two pages in that basement before putting the book away.  

I tried to keep at it in the days that followed, rising with the sun each morning for an hour or two of heavy reading. I stopped after a few weeks though, having decided that this avenue for learning was too difficult to explore. The sting from this defeat was acute, but I would not allow it to linger.

Cosmos was a show that I’d discovered while scrolling through my Netflix feed for a viable option a few years previous, and it became my destination for retreat from my war with the astronomy book in the present. Narrated by a charismatic guide named Neil DeGrase Tyson, the show utilized animation, photographs, and storytelling, combining these three elements with concrete facts to deliver curriculum that was so much easier to digest.  I sat before my computer screen for two straight days, while only taking breaks to shower and eat because I was enthralled with the science that I had eschewed when I was younger.  I came away from this marathon session with a firm grasp of the content, and a renewed excitement for what was to come.

Halley’s Comet is set to make its next appearance in the year 2062.  Therefore, I should be guaranteed at least another 46 years of life, which is slightly more than 50% of my life span. You may be a bit skeptical of my guarantee since you are under the impression that life holds no guarantees. Yes, I know. The world is full of overt and hidden dangers that can easily snuff out my life on any day; the dreaded cancer runs in my family; and if I were to escape cancer my body will break down and become more vulnerable to other diseases as I age. I often wonder about these issues too.  But as is the case with the other goals that have been scrawled on white paper and posted to my bedroom wall, if it is written so shall it be guaranteed to come into fruition, somehow. 

Isn’t it ironic?  It is with the execution of this essay that I have done what I’ve loathed in the past: created an expectation that others beyond my immediate purview can hold me too, but with no accompanying case of the nerves this time.

Now that I’ve given myself a little more room to breathe I can set out to achieve the other goals that I’ve set for myself. I’ll complete the second half of my book and then become a full-time writer. I’ll find the woman of my dreams and she and I will sire children. Those children will sire children of their own, my grandchildren. And one night we will all marvel at the coming of Halley’s Comet from the porch of the family home that I have purchased. These are some very lofty expectations, but I want you to hold me to them.