#43 Twenty five thousand, five hundred and eighty

Heads up! This is NOT a Looping or boating post. It’s personal. I just felt like using my platform here to post this. Skip it if you’re looking for boating news, that will resume after this break. (We head back to the boat Sunday, next week bound for Savannah.)

Hey, y’all. How about this? I turn seventy in April. Seventy. (And I know a lot of people reading this are in the same neighborhood.) This birthday, I will have opened my eyes to the morning light twenty five thousand, five hundred and eighty times. (Well, minus the times I stayed up all night.) Each one a new day. A brand-new day, fresh as a blank sheet of paper.

If each day was a sheet of paper, and stacked up, they’d reach eight feet five inches. Not exactly sky-high—but a stack of twenty five thousand mornings is nothing to sneeze at. And you know, most of us don’t wake up thrilled by the gift of a fresh day. Instead, we’re anesthetized by routine; errands, jobs, meals, rituals. One day slides into the next. We often overlook the fact that each day is unique, fleeting, and irreplaceable. Like a penny, a single day seems small. But fill a seventy-year jar with them, and you realize you’ve amassed a fortune in memories.

They say life flashes before your eyes when you die. I don’t know about that—but at seventy, I can tell you…life flashes anyway. And it’s dazzling, messy, beautiful, heartbreaking…all at once. The extraordinary days—those are the days that stay with you. One day my kids were born. One day I fell in love. One day my brother died. One day I graduated. One day I chased a dream. One day that dream came true. Each day is a milestone, even though we don’t always realize it at the time. Fortunately, many days remain vivid. Days when life rang with fun, laughter and love. I carry those moments with me. I remember. I treasure them.

Seventy feels strange. A bit surreal. Looking back at, say, forty is like peering through thick glass. The memories are there, like plots and characters from a movie I saw long ago, but the details blur. What did I do the day I turned forty? How were my kids? My friends? Those memories are like a boat’s wake: sparkling bubbles that disperse and vanish, leaving only the faintest trace. I regret seeing those days fade away. In fact, it seems that to forget those moments is somehow disrespectful to the people with whom I made those memories.

Seventy is hard. Seventy brings more loss than any other birthday. Parents, brothers, friends, family, co-workers and neighbors, gone. A person is a world; how can an entire world disappear? And yet it happens. When I see someone younger than me die—their whole life passing while I continue—I have to wonder why I’m still here. It’s a peculiar feeling. It’s also a little strange to see movie stars and other famous people, whom I grew up with, grow old and die. Each one is a notch, marking the emergence of a new world as the old leave and the new arrive, like new leaves pushing off the old in the spring.

Seventy brings cynicism. The world, once full of hope and possibility, has shown me its bones: greed, fear, ignorance, bigotry, cruelty. The sense of possibilities that once expanded away from me in all directions like the burst of a supernova has diminished, from what might be to what I might accomplish in whatever time I have left. I now feel somewhat detached. I’ve been arguing, fighting and competing with the world’s idiots and observing them lie, cheat and kill each other on the news for fifty years and I am weary of it; let them go to hell their own way. I don’t have the time or energy to care anymore. Rather, I hope I’ve left a small, positive footprint, helped a few people, done a little good.

Seventy is creaky. My body is slower. Flexibility, stamina, and energy have faded. Hair thins, aches persist. My mind remains mostly sharp—I think—but sometimes, like my body, it reminds me of its limits.

Seventy also brings deep contentment. I have been more fortunate than 99.999% of people who have ever lived. I was born in America, grew up during a stable period, lived free from famine, major war, economic collapse, natural disasters or nuclear armageddon. I had wonderful parents. A healthy family life. I lived in an environment conducive to growth and dreams and possibilities. I have a body that looks like it’s going to last a while yet. I’ve had more fun than I can tell you about without revealing secrets that shouldn’t be revealed.

As well as fun, it’s been wildly interesting. I’ve lived a span of time unlike any other, ever. I like that I am able to look back over my span of history to a time before plastic, before urban blight and strip malls and fast-food chains. Before television, almost! I like that I can remember in my bones what it felt like to have a lot fewer people in the world than there are today. Five point five billion fewer, to be exact. Five billion feels different, trust me. Life was very different then, just because of the fact there were five billion fewer people, in fact about three hundred and forty-five million fewer just here in America. It was a feeling of space, more space between people, between houses, cars, between tempers. More open spaces where a kid could explore and hear bird songs. More space for life.

And last, seventy brings amazement at the exponential rate of change I’ve seen. We’re all a bit stunned by that, I think. Even the music, fads and fashions of the sixties, which so influenced my generation, now feel as distant as the age of the pyramids.

Growing older is simply astonishing. Seeing the changes roll by is a little like watching the landscape from the window of an ever-accelerating train. The minutes pass by like the clack-clack of the wheels, the acceleration going mostly unnoticed as they add up to hours, then days, until the years flash past. Somehow we move from one age to another, from thirty to forty to fifty to seventy, in successions like the chambered nautilus sealing a cell to move on to yet another, leaving one chamber filled with pain, loss, laughter, hope and mistakes, only to begin anew, attempting, in our idealistic human way, to seed each fresh new chamber with the memories of love, happiness, and pleasure that we want to carry with us.

Even after seventy years, I can’t fully explain it.

But I can tell you this:

Life is astonishing.
It is fragile.
It is fleeting.
And it is…fabulous.

So when your morning light opens tomorrow—really see it.

And if you’re lucky enough to make it to seventy…
Make it count.

(One last thought. Yep I’m old: The Deep Atlantic Ocean Ridge pushes the European continent and the Americas apart at a rate of .8 to 2 inches yearly, or an average of about 1 inch per year. The Atlantic ocean is now five point eight feet wider than when I was born.)