Maudlin Thoughts on My Aging

 Sometimes I visualize humanity like a huge composite rock. There are quartzes, and clays,  obsidians, and soapstone all smashed together. Sharp cutting edges and accepting softness. brittle in one place, flowing in another. reflective here and dull there. Each of us born a fragment. a small random assortment of actualities and tendencies. Each of us sees our own particular peculiarities and combinations. If we chance to get some reflective or soft pieces we see or feel our similarities with others and also see or feel the differences.

From as far back as I am aware, I have lived mostly inside myself. The light inside has always seemed bright and like a house at night, the windows reflect back and it is hard to see the outside. As I think more, I apprehend less of the outside world. I have a large memory for structures and a small memory for specific occurrences. As a result, I cannot tell you much about my life. I can tell you what I have deduced, but not much of what I have specifically experienced. I see what I have done, I can tell you how it is put together. If I find the right thread I can tell you what I was thinking when I did it. I remember many fragments of experience. Walking down a particular road on a particular day, riding a bike up a particular hill, sitting with a friend, and also the searing pain of when I have hurt others. But this is not an integrated whole. Things that occurred decades ago are mixed up with yesterday. I live mostly in a permanent now. Always constructing a model of the world and how I should behave in it. My children would sometimes say "You told me ..." and often I would say "That doesn't sound like me." because I could not remember, but it was not consistent with the way I behave in the world. You can see it in this essay. It is abstract, with few examples.

I have the full range of emotion. I love and hate, get happy angry and fearful. From childhood I have had a strong fear of rejection. This has caused a shyness and withdrawal that I have consciously worked to overcome. I also have an outsized aversion to inconveniencing those around me. If I can do something without asking for help, I will. I will do this even when there are those around who would be happy to assist. As a general tendency and later as a philosophy I have looked at people as mostly good and worthy. I like to help them as I wander along. I am fond of most people even when they exasperate me. I can be cruel and petty, but I try hard to repress this. I believe in compassion toward everything.

I am good at figuring out how things work. This combined with an innate curiosity means I know a lot about a lot of things. I also know enough to know that my knowledge is shallow and much of it may eventually be proven wrong. I think most people consider me to be knowledgable and reasonably competent as long as you ignore my tendency to forget things and walk into walls. As I wander along I try to take the role of educator when I think I know something and student when I don't.

I do not understand my emotions. Every once in a while a person comes along and I form an immediate and strong attraction. I am sure there is a sexual component, but only a component. I am a cis male and most, but not nearly all, of these pairings are with women. Usually I assume the feeling is one sided. Whan that appears to be the case, I try to not inconvenience them with the strength of my feelings. Even when there is reciprocation, I allow the exigencies of lives and families to get in the way of expression. I almost insist they make choices that are the best and most consistent for their lives without consideration of feelings, particularly my feelings.

Day by day, I got older. It happened gradually, but then faster and finally almost suddenly. Now when people look at me they see old. Looking back I see that I have set goals, made choices and stuck with them even when, in hindsight, they weren't always the wisest choices. I have attempted, and often accomplished, things that I found to be very difficult. I have also failed. I have let people down, I have hurt them and I have hurt the world around me. I have not done as much or been as good as I might have. Nothing I have done has been any kind of perfect. I hope much of it has been good enough to serve the purpose. I console myself with the Jesse Winchester lyric "Well goodness knows he could have been better, but heaven knows he could have been worse. If you've lit up the occasional candle, you're allowed the occasional curse"

Now my path is getting close to its end and a predominant feeling I have is that of loss. It is natural to have different groups of friends and family in different stages of life and in different places. Circumstances change, opportunities change. I move, they move. Contact becomes sparse then is lost. This gives me a large number of people I have grown close to or even loved deeply who are simply gone to me. Some of them have died and are literally gone. In addition to the ordinary changes of being that come with life and experience, now I deal with the changes caused by age and decay. I have lost strength, endurance, eyesight...

So here I am, always separated from the world by my interior life. Separated from others by my shyness and reserve. Now separated by time and space as everything drifts away. I have friends and family, but I have lived for a while and these current relationships are only a small part of the totality of relationships formed over my life, hence the feeling of loss.