Tag: mortality

Categories
Aging Living

Life Is Wide Open. And Then It’s a Pinhole.

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.

Categories
Japan Living

The Sweetness of the End

The tragedy isn’t that the bloom falls; the tragedy would be if it stayed forever, plastic and unchanging, immune to the wind. We spend so much of our lives trying to build fortresses against decay, seeking “permanent solutions” and “everlasting” bonds, yet we find our deepest emotional resonance in the things that are actively slipping through our fingers.

In Autumn Light, Pico Iyer captures a truth that Japan has long held as a cultural pulse:

“We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.”

This is the essence of mono no aware—the bittersweet pathos of things. It is the realization that the glow of the sunset is sharpened by the encroaching dark. If the sun hung at the horizon indefinitely, we would eventually stop looking. It is the ticking clock that forces our attention into the present.

When we look at a ceramic bowl mended with gold—kintsugi—we aren’t just seeing a repair. We are seeing a celebration of the break. The frailty of the clay is part of its history, and the gold doesn’t hide the fracture; it illuminates it. It suggests that the object is more beautiful now because it was vulnerable enough to break and survived to tell the tale.

In our own lives, we often mistake fragility for weakness. We hide our grief, our aging, and our transitions, fearing that they diminish our value. But beauty isn’t found in the absence of a shelf life. The most profound moments of connection—the way a child’s hand feels before they grow too big to hold yours, the specific light of a Tuesday afternoon in October, the final conversation with a mentor—derive their power from their expiration date.

To love something that cannot last is the ultimate act of human courage. It requires us to lean into the “sweetness” Iyer describes, knowing full well that the ending is baked into the beginning. We don’t love the cherry blossoms despite the fact that they will be gone in a week; we love them because of it.

Categories
Family Friends Living

The Texture of Tuesday

There is a terrifying calmness to the math of mortality. Especially when you’re in your 70’s approaching 80!

Sahil Bloom shared a realization that acts as a quiet sledgehammer to the soul: “You’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.” When you live away from them, visiting a few times a year, the calculus is brutal.

But there is a second, more subtle layer to this reality that we often miss. It isn’t just about the number of times we visit; it is about the nature of the time we share together.

When we live away from the people we love, we fall into the “Trap of the Big.” Because the investment to visit is high—a six-hour flight or a three-hour drive—we feel the need to justify that investment with an Event. We visit mostly for milestones, for holidays, and for planned long weekends. Maybe we schedule time to go on vacations together. We curate our presence around those highlights.

The problem is that life does not happen in the highlights. Real intimacy is not built on Thanksgiving dinner; it is built on the mundane friction together of a Tuesday afternoon. Or a Sunday morning.

Sahil wrote about a moment that shifted his entire perspective. It wasn’t a grand celebration, but a quiet spring evening in the backyard. Dinner was over. He was drinking a glass of wine. His son was chasing his parents around the grass.

“In that moment, I had a realization: This was it. It wasn’t big or glamorous. It was a little thing that meant everything.”

This brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s suggestion: “Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.”

There is a specific texture to life that only exists in the small moments. It is the texture of going for a walk to ask your dad for advice on a random problem. Or the texture of watching a a young mother playing dinosaurs with her 2 year old daughter on a Wednesday morning. It is that ability to be present not just for the celebration of life, but for the living of it.

If we are lucky, we get those big moments. But if we are intentional, we can also get the little ones. And in the end, the little ones are the only ones that actually fill our jar.

Categories
Living Music

The Strangest of Places

There is a particular kind of silence that fills the room when you read the obituary of a contemporary. It isn’t just the news of a celebrity passing; it is a check engine light on your own dashboard. Bob Weir is gone. He was 78. I am 78.

I have good memories of seeing him playing with Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, et al at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Such a different time the 60’s were and the Dead’s music was a big part of that.

When you share a birth year with someone, you share a timeline. You walked through the same decades, witnessed the same wars, the same shifts in culture, albeit from different vantage points. For Weir, it was from the stage of the Fillmore or Winterland Ballrooms and stadiums across the world. For me, it was a different path. But arriving at this specific mile marker—seventy-eight years of age—feels like we both pulled into the same station at the same time, only for him to disembark while I stay on the train a little longer.

I was reminded of a line from “Scarlet Begonias,” quoted recently by Alyssa Mastromonaco:

“Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

In our youth, those “strangest places” were literal—backstage hallways, late-night diners, or the chaotic joy of a festival crowd. We looked for the light in the noise. But at 78, the definition of strange changes. The strangest place to find the light now is often in the mirror, observing a face that has weathered nearly eight decades. Or it is found in the quiet of an early morning, realizing that the absence of pain is its own kind of euphoria.

Weir spent a lifetime improvising, trusting that the music would find its way back to the tonic note. There is a lesson in that for those of us left here. The “light” isn’t always a flash of brilliance or a grand finale. Sometimes, if you look at it right, the light is simply the grace of being here, right now, able to listen to the song one more time.

The music never really stops, does it? It just changes players.

Categories
Aging Living

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