The world is shrinking. Or so we’ve come to appreciate. Jet travel has made it possible to get almost anywhere on the planet in less than a day. And yet.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve become increasingly reluctant to do the kinds of things I wouldn’t have hesitated to do as a younger man. Travel. Driving in busy traffic. Walking the streets in a sketchy urban neighborhood. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary texture of a life lived outward, which turns out to require a kind of low-level willingness I don’t always find in myself anymore.
I’ve been trying to understand this.
When I turned 60 I did something I’d never done before. I looked up my life expectancy on a CDC table. The number that came back was 22. I sat with that for a moment. Twenty-two years. I had been alive for 60 and I had 22 more in the actuarial average, which meant I was already three-quarters of the way home. Nobody had told me this was coming. Not the number exactly, but the feeling the number produced — the sudden rearrangement of the geometry, the sense that the horizon had quietly moved while I wasn’t watching.
I’ve been watching it since.
The metaphor I keep returning to is a camera lens. When you’re young the aperture is wide open. You travel. You navigate. You walk into unfamiliar neighborhoods without thinking about it because the lens is just doing what lenses do — starving for light, taking it all in, indiscriminate in the way that only the young can afford to be indiscriminate.
Then it starts to stop down.
Not all at once. There is no morning when you wake up and find the aperture closed. It happens gradually, a slow tightening over years, and you don’t notice because you’re still inside the frame, still moving through the world. Until one day you notice you’re thinking about the trip before you book it. Weighing it. The weighing itself is new.
What I didn’t expect is that the closing doesn’t feel linear. It feels exponential. The rate accelerating in ways that keep outrunning my revised estimates. You recalibrate. Then you recalibrate again. The next recalibration comes sooner than the last.
A friend saw Paul Simon in concert last night. That sent me back to Kodachrome, one of his early hits, a young man’s song about color and vividness and the wide-open lens of youth. Everything looks worse in black and white, he sang at 31. Something about that lyric now, from this side of the aperture, makes it more true than it probably was when he wrote it.
He just thought he was writing about being young.
As a young family with two kids we toured southern England staying at farmhouse B&B’s. One of those vacation memories that linger. We visited the Cotswolds. A place where the stone is the color of late afternoon even at nine in the morning. The thing that catches you there isn’t the famous honey-colored villages but the little creeks running through them — water moving in ways you didn’t expect, off to the side of what you came to see.
I won’t go back. Not because I’ve decided not to. Simply because the aperture has moved and the Cotswolds is on the other side of it now. Still lit. Still there. The creeks still running through in their surprising way.
This is not tragedy.
It is just true.
A stopped-down lens has a property that took me a while to appreciate. The depth of field becomes enormous. Everything in the frame holds with equal sharpness — the near thing and the far thing, the room you’re sitting in and the long accumulated past the room contains. You lose the beautiful blur. You lose the selective mercy of a wide aperture that lets the background go soft and permits you to choose, by implication, what matters.
Now the background insists.
Nothing escapes attention. The specific quality of a morning. The thought that arrives before anything is being asked of you. The idea carried for years, worked through carefully, finally put into words.
Hermann Hesse understood something about this. The deepest lesson of Siddhartha isn’t something the protagonist learns from a teacher. It’s something he has to live until he knows it. Wisdom of this kind cannot pass from one person to another. It has to be earned on the inside, in real time.
Which is another way of saying it cannot be taught at all.
I can describe the aperture. I can hand you the metaphor. But you will only know what I mean when you are standing inside it yourself.
I couldn’t have written any of this at 60. Couldn’t have written it at 70. The aperture had to close this far before whatever this is came into focus — the particular clarity that arrives not despite the narrowing but because of it.
Nobody told me that was coming either.
That’s what I wanted to say.