health – Scott Loftesness

“All of us have little fissures in our lives that provide us greater than normal moments of freedom. You play the seams when you identify those moments and seize them.”
Neal King (American Ramble)

We often conceive of our lives as following fairly rigid scripts and routines. We wake up, go to work or school, come home, eat dinner, maybe squeeze in some hobbies or time with loved ones, then go to bed and repeat. The cycles feel inescapable, like train tracks laid out before us.

But if we look closer, there are tiny fissures and fault lines running through even the most regimented of daily grinds. Moments where the iron grip of obligation loosens ever so slightly. A traffic jam that makes you late, forcing you to take an alternate route. A cancelled meeting that clears an unexpected hour in your calendar. A power outage that shuts down the office and sends everyone home early. A flat tire that happens at the worst possible time and place – like happened to me yesterday!

These are the seams that Neil King refers to in the quotation. Little rips and tears in the fabric of our routines that create momentary pockets of freedom. Openings where the rules don’t quite apply and we can slip through the cracks of the scheduled order.

The key, as King notes, is to first identify these seams when they occur, and then seize them rather than letting them pass by unnoticed or unremarked upon. It’s about being present enough to your circumstances to recognize when one of these fissures opens up, and then brave enough to diverge from the mapped out path to explore it.

After all, some of life’s greatest adventures and discoveries have happened during these “off script” moments. Yesterday, my conversation with a tow truck driver opened my eyes to the steps he took to fend off a mountain lion attack on a 5 AM run in the dark! I hope I never have to apply his techniques but I did find our conversation about his encounter fascinating!

Of course, these serendipitous detours and unplanned paths are easy to romanticize after the fact, when we know they turned out well. In the moment when the seams first crack open, it can be daunting to jump through them into the unknown. Sometimes we have to but our ingrained instinct is to stick to our set schedule, to get back on course as quickly as possible.

There’s comfort and safety in routines. Seizing those fissures when they present themselves means trading certainty for adventure, the familiarity of a well-worn groove for the risk and exhilaration of going off road into the unknown. It requires being able to quiet that voice of fear inside us that clings to control and embrace one of spontaneity and serendipity in where the detour might lead.

The rewards of following those detours down their winding paths are often worth it. While not every seam we slip through will result in a life-altering event, they allow us to break up the monotony, to experience something different from our repetitive routine, even if just for a little while. Those moments add texture and vibrancy to our days. They’re the asides and ad-libs to the main scripts we follow. Often they provide those special moments we vividly remember and want to share with others.

So keep your eyes peeled for those little fissures and unexpected openings in your routine. Don’t just impatiently wait for life to reset to its default settings once these moments arise. Seize them while you can and see where they lead you. You might just stumble into a beloved new local cafe, or finally muster the courage to start writing, or meet someone who changes your life’s trajectory and opens even more new possibilities.

The seams are there, waiting to be played whenever we’re bold enough to follow their diverging paths. All we have to do is watch for the fissures and be willing to step through into the open spaces of freedom they reveal. Who knows what new experiences and challenges await us on the other side? What new learning might result?

Time’s Tightening Lens

Margaret flipped the calendar to April, taking a moment to pencil in a dentist appointment for the 15th. As her eyes traced the upcoming weeks and months laid out in tidy little boxes, a pang of something indescribable tugged at her heart.

She had just celebrated her 75th birthday a few weeks prior. The well-wishes and family gatherings had been lovely, of course, but it also brought into sharp focus the reality of where she was in life’s journey.

“The days may be long, but the years are shortening,” she muttered under her breath, adapting an old adage. How true it rang.

When Margaret was young, summers seemed to stretch into eternities of adventures and discoveries. The school year trudged by in an endless succession of monotonous weekdays, only brightened by bright visions of the coming break. Back then, the iris of her life’s lens was wide open, framing each experience and possibility in brilliantly expansive clarity.

Then came the headlong rush of early adulthood – college, career, marriage, mortgages, raising children. Those years flashed by in a kaleidoscopic blur of milestones and transitions as the lens iris gradually began contracting.

As she hit her 50s, then 60s, Margaret noticed the iris tightening more rapidly, compressing the time between each passing holiday, season, and anniversary into an ever-dizzying cycle. Her fading eyesight from developing cataracts didn’t help matters, casting a hazy filter over the world.

But then, a few years ago, the miracles of modern medicine gave Margaret’s vision a new lease on life. The cataract surgery and implanted lenses allowed the vibrant colors and crispness of the world to flood back in like a rediscovered treasure. In that sense, her visual perspective expanded once more, even as the metaphorical iris of her life continued its contraction.

And now, at 75, it was as if someone was inexorably closing that iris tighter with each advancing year:

“For the majority of my journey, the road ahead stretched endlessly, with infinite possibility. Now, I can see the horizon in the rearview mirror growing larger by the day as my lens’s aperture shrinks.”

Margaret sighed and rested her chin in her hand, the April calendar still open before her. She knew her remaining years were dwindling – not infinite and permanent as they once felt, but finite and fleeting. Compounding the sense of time slipping away was Margaret’s deteriorating health and mobility in most respects.

Just last year, her knee replacement surgery and recovery had put a frustrating damper on her activity levels. The idea of extended travel grew less appealing by the day as simple acts like walking through an airport became more taxing and painful. Margaret felt her world gradually contracting in parallel with the narrowing iris of her life.

The tender moments spent with her grandchildren took on even greater poignancy these days. Holding them close, breathing in their young scent, Margaret fought back tears at the realization that her lens’s window was just about fully closed – she may only get a precious few more years of making memories with them before her body gave out completely. She wonders whether she will live to see them graduate from high school, or from college, or get married and have children of their own? She starts adding numbers together – but then stops, it’s just not helpful.

“When you’re young and healthy, the whole world is framed in a brilliant wide-angle vista,” she thought with a melancholy smile. “But as you age, your lens’s aperture shrinks tighter with every passing day, slowly dimming and limiting your horizons along with your vitality. Sometimes, though, modern medicine can re-expand part of that diminishing vista, if only for a short time.”

As Margaret reflected, she wondered why this profound truth about the compression of time couldn’t be more visibly grasped and heeded in one’s youth. Perhaps it was the utter lack of firsthand experience with anything but the perception of a boundless future stretching ahead. Or the youthful naivete and feeling of invincibility that blinds us to the inevitability of age and mortality.

Or maybe it was the sheer inability to emotionally connect with and envision the people we’ll become further down the road – our future elderly selves feel like separate beings, unmoored from our present gaze. Our culture’s obsession with perpetual youth and human hardwiring for present-bias didn’t help either, constantly diverting attention away from the road’s eventual dead-end.

By the time that bone-deep wisdom of time’s finicky passage finally sets in, it’s often too late to fundamentally reorient our paths and appreciate the expansiveness while it still lasts. If only there was a way to bottleneck that epiphany to the young, Margaret thought, to inspire them to maximize their ambitions before that iris inevitably narrows to a sliver.

Margaret closed the calendar, arose from the kitchen table, and headed out into the backyard garden she had cultivated for over 40 years. The vibrant blooms seemed to pop with richer color and clarity thanks to her recently restored eyesight. More than ever, she wanted to soak in and appreciate every beautifully ordinary day and finite vista she had left, before her lens finally closed entirely.

Aging is one of the many happenstances over which we humans have absolutely no control, but – as with all happenstances – we have absolute control over how we play (or don’t play) the cards dealt us by the fickle fingers of fate.
Joe Klock

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