50 (a 2-part essay)
PART 1: On Becoming 50

twenty years ago i had a breakdown of sorts. it kinda came out of nowhere. it was right around my 30th birthday. a year earlier my mom had given me the name and phone number of my biological mother saying she thought i was old enough to have it now. fact is, she thought i was old enough for a good while but kept waiting for me to ask about it. i never did so she was just giving me the information so i would have it. after a conversation about how and where she got the sensitive information, i thanked her for the gesture but slid the envelope back her way and with a boy's smile told her i already knew my mother's name AND phone number.

eleven months later marty and i just finished watching mr. holland's opus and one of us was crying. the un-crying one clapped me on the thigh, said she had papers to grade and moved to the kitchen table. she passed back through the living room an hour later to find me in the same spot and still crying. after wondering what sort of hamster she just married she took a moment to ask what was wrong. the short version is my life was awesome, but i had not given the effort i should have to deserve a life this good. it had all been set in my lap. first by the woman who gave me up for adoption. then by the woman who adopted me. then by the woman who married me. and there was even another woman, a professional mentor who taught me a lot about being an adult.

so here i am having won four life lotteries when many win none, and some are even taxed again and again and again through hardships and bad breaks and just horrendous luck. more importantly, at that moment i had done hardly a thing to earn or acknowledge or even appreciate these boons. i would never say i expected them, but i also did not work for them or seek them out. seemingly some sort of cosmic karma was working in my favor. so, in the end, i was experiencing a massive load of guilt that i hadn't done more with all that had been given to me.

this is the realization i had, and somehow that movie knocked it loose from whatever crevice it had been hiding in. i was palpably unsatisfied, disgusted even, with my effort thus far. i knew i had more in me if only i'd try. my mother knew this from minute one. hence the mantra of my home "you can do better." so shortly after my thirtieth birthday, i decided to try, to try for once in my life. the first steps were for sure painful. the fact was, i had an infant's brain in this regard and making it mindful took an immense amount of learning and failing and re-learning and effort. in short, i had a lot of making up to do. thirty years worth to be precise.

for a long while the gains were small, imperceptible really. you don't see anything happening, but you have a sense of it, or maybe it is you have faith in it, but it is surely hard to spot anything that slow-moving with the naked eye. but now, twenty years later when i can scan the two-decade landscape, the delta is great, from where i was then to where i am now. success by a thousand strokes.

the good news, the best news of this is it doesn't matter how long it took me to arrive at this awareness, all the matters is that i now have an awareness. that is the key or at least has been the key for me. and i remember the first win in this reclamation project. i worked with a guy, and he loved life possibly more than any other person i had ever met. he was the most-alive and smiling and joyous person i knew. he writhed, literally, with excitement and engagement in nearly everything. so the monday after mr. holland broke me, i went to his desk first thing and asked him point blank why is he so happy. what is his trick? before he could reply, i told him not to credit his religion, as he was quite religious, because i knew a lot of miserable religious people. without missing a beat he said, i've got the book for you and gave me a name and a title. i had the book before i went to bed that night. i devoured it in days. i remember one morning reading it on the subway going to work. when i paused from the passage and looked up, tears were streaming down my face. the book had me so absorbed i didn't even realize it was happening. but that book was the start for me.

you'll notice i don't mention the name of the book. that is intentional because it was not about the book. i mean sure, the book got me going and showed me some tricks, but there are a lot of similar books out there. it wasn't the book itself. it was my state of mind. it was my readiness for change. that is what made it work. curiously, more than ten years later i ran into that co-worker who pointed me to the book. i thanked him for the recommendation and told him the important role it played for me. he asked what i was talking about. i recounted the story for him in, i promise you, exacting detail. he said he didn't know what i was talking about. i said and re-said the title and the author. he said he'd never heard of the book and was pretty sure he'd never read it. at seeing the look of bewilderment on my face he added with one of his gigantic smiles, "i'm glad it helped you though." just about every time i think i have a handle on some part of life it slips from my fingers as if coated with Vaseline (and for what it's worth, i hate touching Vaseline).

to abbreviate what had changed from the first thirty years and the last twenty (and what that book exposed to me) was simply knowing what i cared about and giving time to those things every day. that was it. what the book taught me was that i could not name the things that most-mattered to me. this is not to say that my mind and consciousness didn't know what they were because they did. it just means i was not actively aware of them which means i was likely not giving attention to those 'important' things in any sort of regular manner. so that was the change. first, i took time to conciously discover the things that mattered to me most, i wrote them down, i ordered them by their level of import. and then i made sure that i touched each of them every day. i learned to evaluate the things asking for my time and see if it aligned with the items on my list. if it could be connected to the list, it got through. if it was not, it was politely set aside. it's kinda like having a bouncer working the door to your time.

if there is a routine casualty to this new awareness, it is the pain and guilt i have for squandering my first thirty years. now yes good things happened in there, but as confessed, i'm not sure how or why i deserved them (or what might have been possible had i been paying attention sooner). but they did happen. my angst is about all of the precious hours i let spill onto the ground, hours that i can obviously never get back. but there is nothing to be done, as they say, about spilt milk (or spilt hours). all you can do is work to protect the drops you still have.

there's also the notion that if i had done a little better in my younger years, i wouldn't hold myself so accountable now that i'm older. i run into plenty of folks who seemed like they peaked too early and are now spent from all the work and effort they gave in their youth. that just might be the silver lining of my story. since i did so little when young, i am full of energy and stamina and child-like wonder now. this means i've got a big kick left for the back half of this race. and i fully intend to use every last bit of it.

(Part 2: On Being 50)