Life Spans

The task at hand, mundane. Topping off the air in my car's tires via a portable air pump. (Get one.) And while I waited, a glance down at the ground. 

A butterfly. Resting? I waited, looked closer, then gently rocked it back and forth with my index finger.  No, not resting. I wondered, had it dropped from some great height? Had it landed first and then died? A short life? A couple of weeks perhaps as an adult butterfly?

I remember being a bit unnerved by turning 35. Felt like a sort of midway point. But I changed my mind when I figured I wasn't halfway through my adult years. That would be around my mid-forties I calculated. Would I care? As I recall, I didn't.

Some weeks before my 70th birthday, I did some simple arithmetic. On the date I was born in 1953, someone turning 70 that day was born in 1883. Someone born this year on my birthday will be 70 in 2093. Maybe all that is a goofy notion--certainly not my goofiest. But, I find the span of several lives when put that way eye-opening. 

And, dear reader, if you are under, oh let's say 50, just roll your eyes and get on with whatever strikes you as a better use of your time. Or consider your life, the span of it to date. 

Have you loved and been loved? Have you laughed? Have you cried? Have you been surprised? Shocked? Amused? Learned some stuff? Seen new things? Been to new places?

Yes? Congratulations. Fifteen or 30. Ten or 50. Or 5 even. You have lived a full life. 

 

At 70

Might be a case of hubris, but I'm anticipating celebrating--very, very quietly--my 70th birthday tomorrow. Should I wake. But, so far, so good right up to the cusp of 70 years. We shall see. Or maybe I won't.

In my early to mid-fifties, I started using the phrase "Upright is all right" to signify my sense of how waking to another day, bed covers tossed aside, feet on the floor, marked a victory of a sort. Hey, look, still alive, and now on with the day. 

I did trot out the phrase occasionally when asked how I was doing by my students. Sometimes some were put off a bit by what they judged to be a cavalier dismissal of life's grandest possibilities. Some chuckled. Well, few, actually very few were amused. Probably just as well. 

Certainly I didn't intend to be dismissive of life, just trying to suggest life is not to be taken for granted. Perhaps too glibly for the subject matter. 

But, in fact, I am for want of a better term a life-ist. How incredible to be alive, to be an individual on this planet, this tilt-a-world that we think of as a home. Amazing. And then the solar system, the galaxy, and certainly even more preposterous, the universe.

And there may be soon 8 billion of us. Each one so highly improbable, and yet so very many of us--that notion, too, preposterous.

Now I am not going to stake any claim to living each day fully. I am not on any grand mission. Even as time hurtles forward, and I without much that demands being hurried. Even as I know--I can feel it--time, my days ahead, dwindle. True for all, but I do not remember making much of this notion in my teens or thirties or for that matter in my fifties. Despite my clever little aphorism.

Life-ism, I propose, is a head-shaking incredulity at us all. Our foibles, our triumphs, our cruelties, our passions, our disasters, our very being. How strange and marvelous to be alive.

Perhaps for a few more breaths, a last run of heartbeats. Or 20 years more. Now how could that possibly be?

Perhaps, time for a bucket list.

How about whatever the day should bring, should it come.