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| We all fall down |
As adults, we get older, for the most part, without really noticing it. Yes, I recognize I am fifty-whatever, but I don't see a lot of difference between fifty this and fifty that, or even forty something. The milestones of birthdays have long since lost their meaning, becoming just another day in which we are fractionally creakier than we were the day before.
So I am surprised to find myself suddenly feeling distinctively older than I have ever felt before. It is the unwelcome product of a bunch of unwelcome events. It started when I broke my collarbone playing in the Pacific surf some weeks ago. That was debilitating and though I think I am healing well, I am not the same. I'm also recovering from COVID, my first bout and not a terrible one by that yardstick, but draining. Isolation, bed time, it makes you feel smaller.
But it's not just health. In the midst of this I traveled to help with my mother, who was very sick and who died within a week of this last visit to her. That death obviously contributes to this feeling, but so did watching my siblings cope with that, and so does watching the family plan the funeral and make the arrangements. Funerals have before always been something to attend, not something to make decisions about.
The kids are great, but college looms, forcing we parents to think about time and its passage and the future and its implications. And the kids aren't just great, they're also challenging, and not in that simple why-won't-you-leave-me-alone-for-a-minute way they were when they were younger. Really challenging. Like, "we parents need to think about this and when we do we don't necessarily come up with the right response" challenging, not suddenly but quite pointedly at the moment.
And then there are the projects, or rather, Projects. Each is so big, and they all require management and money, and they come, as the picture above suggests, pell-mell and not necessarily when you have the capacity to deal with them. And, for us, they inevitably include lots of time spent wrestling with bureaucracy and that shit does not make you feel any more alive.
And for some reason there are lots of spiders around these days. Really big ones.
Aging happens gradually, silently for the most part, but sometimes it happens with an audible "snap."
