Of Milestones and Birthdays

My turning fifty is rolling in like a menacing ocean fog.  A thick, obscuring, cold sea fog.  It is a false marker but here it is nonetheless.

I call it a false marker because rarely is anything different one day to another or one year to another; it is all usually much more subtle than that and to treat an otherwise ordinary day as an acute angle misses the whole point of the journey.  There are few days in a life when the change is sharp or dramatic and therefore worthy of specific note.

It is fair to measure some specific days – deaths, births, marriage, divorce, discovering a new love, graduations, moving days, winning an event at the Olympics, fighting a battle in a war – where real change provides a true marker or divide.  Whether tragic or bliss, crushing or soaring, the days which slam us are deserving of all the respect, attention and care we can muster.  Birthdays are odd because, to borrow from William Least Heat Moon, they are just the end of another lap around the sun.  Each lap is fun to celebrate but that is all.  Except by coincidence, nothing really changes on those days. 

When we see people all of the time – family, close friends, co-workers – it is all but impossible to notice physical change.  When we see each other only occasionally obviously people are traveling an arch.  In young people the growth can be astounding.  Like a field of corn in July, the change over two weeks can shock almost.  As we get older the changes are less.  More time must pass to see anything meaningfully different.  We note the round numbers then, to quote my daughter, ‘just because,' which is silly but real in a cultural sense: Yea! We are teens; Cool. We’re in our twenties; Oh God, we are thirty; Oh hell, we are forty.  Well, here comes another one.

To mark fifty as a milestone means the number is what?  Pretty?  Organized?  Half?  Half of what?  It is not half a life given life could (and likely will) end well before 100.  It is the end of any vague notion of youth but that too is purely external, physical.  We are who we are inside our own skin.  I am in most ways the same boy I was at nine or ten or twenty.

I have done a lot, or at least lived a lot.  Hopefully that means something.  So how to mark it?  I’d like to define for myself the meaning of turning fifty, rather than leave it to the greeting card industry.  To take such a stand could well be an act of delusion, but it is at least a stand against a relentless tide, making it worthy if not noble.

Here is one thing it means:  I have accumulated things: memories, good and bad; experiences, good and bad; people, pains, oddities, quirks, recipes, habits, books, albums (photo and record), dislikes, likes, ailments, fears, confidences, worries, perspective, clothes, weight, furniture.  So many things piled up in the attic of my existence.  There is no yard sale, barn fire, bulldozer, government action or natural disaster capable of carrying away most of these accumulations.  They are stuck to me worse than glue.  This is of course good and bad but it is mostly just true.

Having said that, some accumulations we can let go.  Fifty is a good time to rent a dumpster and spend two days hauling stuff out of the attic and having it rolled away.  I am not being metaphorical.  Literally, I am saying rent a dumpster and clean the attic.  The rest we cannot, maybe should not, might not want to discard.  Personal decision that, what to discard if you could, but not worth a lot of time given how little we can do to shake off the past.

Turning fifty is an excuse -- a command? -- to do many things:  Learn to play an instrument (or relearn one given up as a kid).  Talk intelligently.  Listen.  No, really listen.  Enjoy sitting.  Exercise.  Coach.  Read everything.  Mentor.  

Do this one.  Wisdom might be creeping in.  Spread it.  It is fertilizer, which is not an insult.  Fertilizer makes things grow.  

Fifty also means there are things we should not do: Fifty is a good age to stop pretending we are still in college.

                   There are a million ways to mark the false marker of completing fifty laps around our sun.  Finding them is like finding weeds in a garden.  Here are a few more.  They can apply really to the successful completion of any lap, and to the extent they are born of accumulated wisdom; I hope they might pull you in a bit:

·      Buy a book full of completely and utterly blank pages and fill them. 

·      Ignore obsequious and condescending people.

·      Don’t be obsequious.

·      Don’t be condescending.

·      Do what you want.

·      Know what you want.

·      Do what you want even if you don’t know what you want.

·      Sometimes doing what you want is not the right thing to do; defer.

·      Be kind and thoughtful with children.

·      Don’t treat children like children.

·      Be ready for failure, sadness, dismay.

·      Work hard.

·      Take your time.

·      Know there is nothing anyone can do to make things turn out well.

·      Things only turn out well if you make them turn out well.

·      At the end of the day, nothing turns out well; we live on a planet blessed with a state of entropy so it is not really worth fighting the constant, irreversible, inevitable and relentless decay of everything around us.

·      Fight entropy.

·      Travel.

·      Cook.

·      Spend time with people you love.

·      Nurture and cherish friendships based on love, appreciation and understanding.

·      Be tolerant.

·      Take risks.

·      Be careful.

·      Think.

·      Trust your instincts.

·      Trust your intuition.

·      Let life accumulate.

Knowing turning fifty is not an acute angle, my plan for the day is to go see the Red Sox with my family (same thing I did at forty, actually) and eat a hot dog.  A lack of judgment, a risk, another accumulation in an already cluttered life.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2010 David Rocchio