If you are following me online, it’s eventual you’ll see that I am returning to my old stomping grounds, the place where my career first began. It’s been a long, twisting road — a very rocky one for much of 2019 — but I am happy to double back (or triple back, in this case).
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“Every time when I look in the mirror,
All these lines on my face getting clearer.
The past is gone.
It went by, like dusk to dawn.”
– Aerosmith
I don’t want to grow old. I refuse to “go gentle into that good night” and will “rage against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas put it.
I define “oldness” as a crescendo of blandness, diminished enthusiasm for life, less arousal/passion, and heightened fatigue. So set in our ways that we can no longer open our minds to accept we don’t know it all.
It’s cliché to say the time went so fast. In some ways, the changes came on too fast, but I felt every last one of those diapers I changed.
I was 33 years old when I became a father. My child lived in the pre-9/11 world for 42 days. She arrived before we had iPods, iPhones, and iPads.
She’s now old enough to buy a lottery ticket, enlist in the Army, get a tattoo or piercing, serve jury duty, drink alcohol in most European countries and Canada, go to jail, and vote for president.
I’m relaxing at home in Fort Payne after a week that included having surgery and closing a chapter in my own story.
I guess you could say I am a bit like Luke Skywalker collapsed in the snow of Hoth. I’ve removed myself from a dire situation after listening to my intuition, now I’m physically strained as my body mends from a stressful event. That voice is guiding me about what to do next, same as Obi Wan appeared to Luke as an apparition in the blizzard with instructions to incite the challenges that will propel our heroes on their next adventure and lead to sacrifice and growth.
“I’m a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been…”
– Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”
Well, sort of a “time traveler”. My job is a straight 45-minute drive from my house in Alabama on a good day with no traffic issues and driving the speed limit. I leave at 6:30 am and usually arrive just before 8:30.
No, I’m not that slow poke you curse as you pass me on the Interstate. Like a lot of people living in North Alabama, I have to drive a bit to get to work, which means passing through the top Northwest corner of Georgia and into the city of Chattanooga, which is located in South Central Tennessee.
It sounds more impressive when I tell people my commute takes me through 3 states.
It’s time to put 2018 to bed and look ahead to the goals we can set in the new year. The chronological line is completely arbitrary, of course, but it’s fascinating to look at blocks of time to reflect on who we were and what mattered to us. Yesterday, I watched a marathon on CNN about “the 2000s” and the events of that decade. We are now in the final year of the following decade. How will historians look back on the events of the final year before our world entered “the twenties.” That sounds weird.
Transitioning to a new year is a healthy “reset button” for the mind, a chance to remind ourselves that time is slipping by, and we have a limited number of days remaining to get stuff done before they lower us into the ground. It’s also fun to guess what lies in store for us and review in 12 months to see how wrong we were.
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