‘Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.’-Marcus Aurelius

‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’-Anais Nin

I started to write this post and it got so massive that I had to split it in two. This is the first half and it’s still too long. There might be too much information in what comes next. TMI. Don’t say I didn’t warn you:

I read yesterday about a major retrospective of the work of Yves Klein happening at the Hirshhorn in my home of D.C. If you’ve never seen his work and you have the chance to go, you should go. If you’re anywhere near D.C., you should go. It will be worth it. I’ve seen his work in person and his paintings have to be seen to be believed. The work I saw was a simple blue canvas, maybe 2 x 3 feet, if that. But it was the most beautiful and vibrant blue I’ve ever seen in any painting anywhere. Just a canvas full of that blue. It’s amazing, that blue. You can’t get it in pictures or words. You have to go and see it. I promise you it will be worth whatever trip you have to take in order to get there.

Sitting all the way down here in Christchurch reading that really messed with me. Brought a lot of thoughts to mind, a flood of emotions. I’ve had such a change in thoughts and outlook over the last year, as I close out my 30′s. I know I’m going to cop all the old mid-life crisis jokes and a ton of other nonsense for putting that out there. I don’t mind. People are going to say what they’re going to say. You’re just deluding yourself if you think you have some control over it. At some we all stop and take serious stock of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. This is my point.

The game is life and the game is out there. Everyone plays it differently, but everyone has to play by the same basic rules and there are only two: everyone gets dealt a hand to play and the house always wins in the end. It’s going to play out whether or not you admit certain truths to yourself. I figure the sooner I do that the sooner I can get back to trying to figure the angles. So I’m going through something. I wouldn’t describe it as a crisis because I don’t feel frenetic or harried, or the need to start over. I’m on a slow burner. The thing that freaks me out though is that I never thought I’d be thinking and experiencing such a wide range before the age of 40. I figured I had at least another 5-6 years before getting into any of that, and at least another 10 or so before it really hit the fan.

I never liked that term mid-life crisis. It always seemed male-specific and equated sudden immaturity and life failure.  It always implied that somehow you’d gotten everything wrong to that point. That you didn’t have yourself together and you somehow needed to start over. To me a mid-life crisis is nothing more than spending a ton of time scaling a mountain and reaching the summit only to look out over the horizon and see you might have spent that time scaling the wrong one. Then you think “Fuck. The really important one is all the way over there. How am I possibly going to get down and get over there? Do I have enough time before the sun goes down? Do I have enough energy? At this point am I even properly equipped to give it another go?”  It seems impossible to start over or summit that other peak because you’ve put all of your planning and prep into this one. Sometimes even if you have scaled the right one you can get all the way up there with the magnificent view and still realize that’s it’s bitterly cold and lonely as hell on that bitch and that maybe you sacrificed too much. That’s where people freak out. Everybody makes their own choice at that point after weighing their options. Some people decide to chance the other peak. Some people are happy to have achieved the one they’re on even if it’s not necessarily the right one. Some can’t believe they’ve spent so much time on the wrong one and sit dejected in the snow and ice waiting to snap out of it. Some sit there hoping someone else is going to come along and fix all of it. And some people decide the fastest way back down is to just throw themselves off the mountain all together. Any of those options might be the best one for that person. You can’t judge another persons life and tell them what the hell they should be doing once they’ve gotten up there. But we’re all human so we all hold and love our petty little judgments I guess.

Anyway I’m not the man I was. I’m young at heart but no longer a young man. I don’t have the appeal that I had in my late 20′s-early 30′s. That good mix of physical beauty and horsepower. My wit has an acidic ring to it and I have days where I seem to have no sense of humor at all. That’s okay. You start to lose your courage and your willingness to try new things. Fear and hesitancy creep in like a pervasive mist. Well, for me that’s not exactly true, but I still feel like a candy-ass for not having made it anywhere in Judo after 4 years. Those injuries from training and the recovery that comes along with it take a lot longer to roll around. I have less energy; that may be a side effect of two young kids and not so much my age. At this point, I can’t tell. Physically I’m in the best condition I’ve ever been in, a level I couldn’t have dreamt up in my 20′s. But I still feel older, grayer and I can’t seem to sleep through the night without having to get up and take a piss. My Doc is concerned and wants to have tests run. It’s got me worried. At night I rarely sleep anymore and when I do, it’s restless at best. As soon as I lie down the thoughts rain down hard: Where am I going? How much time is left? What do I want to do with it? You’re going to die and when you do, where will you go? That’s the game. Play or get played, and a big part of my playing and thinking lately revolves around the discovery of happiness and family/community.

Happiness. It’s taken me a long long time to find that and I spent good chunks of my life up until recently without it. The thing I’ve discovered about happiness is that it’s a lot like raising children: you have to protect it, nurture it. And you have to fight hard and constantly to prevent it from being spoiled and/or ruined by the world at large. It’s fragile man. Because the world will tell you that you should have it, but it won’t tell you how to get it most of the time. What it puts forward is often nonsense that the pursuit of which will do nothing more than lead you further and further away from it: Money. Objects. Notions of how you ‘should’ live. All of that is predicated on someone else’s notion of what happiness is, and a lot of the time it’s motivated by money and percentage points.

People will rain on your happiness. It’s often inadvertent, but I’ve also seen some cruel and malicious mofos who do it on purpose. Sometimes that just can’t be helped, and sometimes we have to sacrifice a bit of our own in order to help our fellow man. It’s what makes for a decent person. But it’s also knowing that some people are content to live in misery because it’s easier to do that than to get off ones ass and try to change some stuff. Like they say: There are people who’d rather sit in shit than let the world see them work a shovel.

Conservation of my energy and emotional clarity is part of my happiness. Kids and marriage have taught me that you if you try to fight every battle you’re just going to get done up. I adore my kids but I swear sometimes they seem to be such vampires that they make Nosferatu look like he’s playing in the minors.  You can pile on the love and attention but at times it’s just not enough. They’re kids so it comes with the territory, but I realize that if I want to maintain any sanity I can’t cave to every emotional requirement. Maybe that’s selfish but between my marriage, my kids, my work, and my clients I’ve only got so much energy to go around in a 24 hour period. We all do. Work, play, and love smarter, not necessarily harder. I’ve tried that road of giving in to every demand and I’ve also tried going to war over everything and neither worked very well. These days I ask myself what I’m really prepared to battle over, because to battle over everything is to only do disservice to oneself. Sometimes the right move is just to step back, save your energy and manpower, and consolidate your position. Smoke and mirrors man, smoke and mirrors.

And I don’t know how I discovered or stumbled into my own level of happiness. I really have no idea and if you offered me a million bucks to put it on paper I still couldn’t come up with it. I’m not trying to say I’ve got it all figured out or that there are things that I no longer need to figure out, or that there are no more days where I’m overrun with misery. I still have envy, jealousy. I still have rage and disappointment. I’m still a pretty crap spouse on a lot of levels. Of course there are situations around me that I have difficulty with. That frustrate the hell out of me: Like, why can’t I seem to get one day without people raging or arguing in my house?  Or why does my life seem sometimes only to be one big, long, drawn-out interval of school homework and school lunches? Or trying to get over that male-dominated notion that as a man somehow I’ve done it all wrong because I don’t have a million in my bank account. Stuff like that. But inside, with myself, for the first time I am happy.  I’m not implying that I can cover all the angles, just that I know myself a bit more, and the more I know, the more I’m at peace with what I know, whether it be the good or the bad. I don’t why that is, but it is. I spent a lot of my life at war with myself. There were two dudes in there battling daily. One guy just wanted peace and the other didn’t know what he wanted other than chaos. I guess that second guy turned out like anyone who witnesses too much carnage: he saw constant mayhem, played too big a part in the destruction of a lot of things, and got so burned out that all he wanted was peace also. Everybody on one page.

I can’t put my happiness into concrete terms: that it’s because I do X or Y. The X’s and Y’s are just byproducts. The levity lies deep within. Hidden from concrete, tangible terms, and that might be the best part about it. If I could put it into words they would ruin it. Like taking a hatchet to a Unicorn.

Image: Yves Klein©®