I’m 42 today. I’ve been able to legally drink for 21 years. To be fair, I drank here and there before that marked touch point, but I digress. Merely using it to put perspective into the mix. I’ve been around for a bit now. It’s been more than 20 years since my first deployment. 20 years since I’ve seen young people go who would’ve been 42 one day had they made it.
I’ve also been a dad for over a decade, perhaps the greatest teacher of all. Uncovering all the ways good and bad that I’m like my parents (and not). It’s been five years since I shed my corporate ladder-climbing gig. It’s been a few years since I’ve been out on my own. I’m glad to be out on my own. But it was hard–still is hard–from time to time, having given up the title, the illusion of power (I was the boss of over a hundred people), the illusion of being “important.” But I walked away from it, and I’m happier now. Love having served the people. Hated the endless shallow grind of business. I’m still happy to serve. To help. But it’s different now. I’ve given myself over, quite selfishly, to simply wanting to be (in no particular order) be kind, be helpful, make/write art, be a dad, husband, friend. That’s all that matters.
42 signifies nothing really. It’s another spin around the sun. I’ve done it 42 times now. I met three people that I still know on day one—my mother, my father, my teddy bear (Teddy Teacup Durante). Incidentally, Teddy is still around and now stays in the bed of my youngest, Neil. He’s 5 and putting the bear to good use. Thankfully, I still have my parents and siblings.
I’m at that tipping point where it’s possible I’m on the back half. None of the men in my family has really made it past the low 70s. I’ve lost several cousins (they didn’t make it to 50). To be fair, I’m a bit more health-conscious than they were. Also, I’m more aware and accepting than ever before that there’s really little that we can control. So all you have is now, and those who love you.
I have a (what would be called unhealthy societally) obsession with the macabre. My gallows humor is through the GD roof. But I think that this is actually incredibly healthy. Because of the lack of control in life, laughing and absurdity is sometimes the only surefire relief from this mad dance that we’re all doing. I would never think of suicide (please don’t mistake this as a lack of feeling for those that have taken that path as I have lost a few to this), if only because, it’s all over so fast anyway.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. It presumes that 42 is the answer, if you could only figure out what the actual question was. We’ll never be able to know though. We’ve got institutions that try to tell us what it’s all about. Telling us how to be. Some of the ideas we hear are good. Some feel funny to us. But no matter what, it’s something that is made real internally, regardless of what you echo/parrot out to the world.
I was listening to a Be Here Now podcast recently (woo woo alert incoming), and heard a quote from Ram Dass where he said, “”The basic social institution is the individual human heart. That’s the only one through which you will hear the clear message. You won’t hear it from the government. You won’t hear it from the church. You won’t hear it from wise teachers. You will ultimately only hear it from inside your own heart. And in fact, you won’t hear it; you will merely slowly become it.”
And I believe it. This is not some veiled aspersion to your or anyone else’s religion, beliefs, or institutions. It’s the knowledge that something isn’t truly real to you until you feel, beyond logic. I mean, less so the dogmatic machinations of what religions say. But rather the knowledge of right and wrong, the knowledge that all our differences are superficial, and barely worth mentioning in the short time we’re allotted. Terms like ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, race, nationality, etc., etc.–they are important parts of your identity to be sure and make you another beautiful part of the tapestry–but they’re not a mark of whether or not you belong, because you DO belong. You do deserve love, no matter those categorical, man-made, biological-made, random one in a jillion odds that you were born where you were when you were under which socio-economic variables. All random. All equally likely when your spark started.
You could have been anyone else. But you’re you. Remember that when you’re processing internal judgments.
So as I get through today, happily, I hope that I can just keep opening my heart and shedding that which doesn’t really matter, being thankful for everything that I have and everything that has happened to me, good and bad, because it’s all part of it.