There have been so many expressions connected to the pressure exerted by time on experience--"So many men, so little time, " or "So many books, so little time."--the notion that there is all that experience out there and not enough time to experience it all, but none of this has much purchase when you are young.
Then the time comes when the kids are out of the house, parents dead, career on track, and you are faced with simple arithmetic: I have only "x" number of years left. What am I going to do with the slice of the pie which remains?
Aunt Violet, of Downton Abbey, addressed this with her arresting remark, "Well, I've been reminded recently that one is only given so many chances in life and if you miss them, they may not necessarily be repeated."She says this when Mrs. Crawley asks about the Russian prince with whom Aunt Violet is considering embarking on a dalliance, if not a full blown affair.
For some people this consciousness of the sands running out drives them to travel. "There's a whole big planet out there and I've seen only a small part." For others, it's the desire to leave their life behind, and to find a perfect village in Tuscany, an apartment in Paris or Lisbon, or Prague, where each morning dawns with unhurried pleasures, every meal a cause for celebration and every night a new wine (or pastry) to enjoy.Each choice however, is a road taken, and walking down that road means others will remain unexplored.
The problem with life is we are always, in some sense, ingenues pushing into uncharted seas. Even a seventy year old has never been seventy before, has no instruction manual for that phase of life.
I just got an email from a man with whom I went to high school. He had been a dutiful student, gone home right after school and studied and got into Harvard, like a good worker ant, a nerd. He longed for certain girls, but never went for them, and now he rues missing those chances. I had been more of a grasshopper in high school, did just enough school work but was not focused on academic success as on sports, girls and adventure. Now he is fixated on our upcoming high school reunion, about which I'm ambivalent. High school was a long time ago. But he is insistent, almost frantic about getting people to return. I suspect he is trying to go back and pick up the pieces, as if he can finally redeem those lost years, reconnect to those people he missed out on and live the life now he missed then. He doesn't seem to have learned what Aunt Violet knows--if you miss the opportunity, there is no second chance.
No road maps in life. We go forth boldly where we have never gone before.
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteWell that's the challenge isn't it-figuring out what it is you really want and then acting on it before the opportunity evaporates. It's easy to be lulled into the false notion that the opportunity to get what you want is there as long as you are. On the contrary-inaction is a choice for the status quo and can lead to a day, often without warning, when the window of opportunity closes-permanently-fini-leaving nothing left of that dream but irreversible regret...So on that happy note Phantom-do you know what you want for the "slice of the pie that remains"?
Maud
Maud,
ReplyDeleteThere are two ways, I suspect, to approach this.
One would be to imagine what you want--e.g.,drinking hot chocolate at Les Deux Magots in Paris--and then soberly assessing whether that dream is practically achievable.
The other would be to do the more adult, reality based thing--do the tour, so to speak. Recently saw how adults do this in Florida, look at real estate, time shares etc.
My lifelong problem has been living in the world of fantasy and getting dragged into the real world, kicking and screaming, by sober realists.
Still haven't figured it out.
That's what I mean about being clueless even at my age.
Most people by now have figured out how the world works.
Maybe I need a brain MRI to find the lesion.
Phantom