Paths Forward and Back

Note: This is a re-post from almost three years ago.

In my thirties, having already attained wise man* status, I used to advise people around the age of, say, 27, that if they were feeling confused about where they were headed in life, "just wait a few years."

"By your mid-30s, it will all be clear. It may seem like you are wandering along a path headed nowhere, but you'll actually reach a rise in the road, and when you look back, it will all suddenly make sense. You'll see every twist and turn in your path and understand why you took them."

This was immensely satisfying to me, not only because I sounded wise, but it actually reflected my own experience up until that time.

On paper, my life may have looked like a straight line, but inside my head, all was confusion. I reached the point in my early 30s when I simply couldn't figure out what I was doing or why.

Not that there were any outer manifestations of my confusion. I kept working, hard, at three jobs, being a responsible husband and father, paying my rent and driving my 1966 Volvo around town in a careful manner.

But none of that solved the existential riddles that consumed my inner clarity, leaving only a fog as impenetrable as that coating the western hills in its place.

This state yielded to a period when I thought I had it all figured out. My roles were clear, my success assured, my path ahead illuminated, with little clue that huge obstacles lay hidden in the dark.

None of it was to be -- none of my assumptions about my future held. All gave way to a new crisis, at the age of 40, when I proceeded to blow my settled life to smithereens.

If I could do one thing over, I probably would back up time and try to do that part of my life over.

But time affords us no such luxury.

Onward I plunged, headfirst into middle age as if I had never known an irresponsible time as a youth. Come to think of it, that was part of the problem. I had never known an irresponsible time as a youth.

Of course. That was it! I'd always been the big brother, the responsible one, the reliable part of any equation, while most others found a way to party and mess things up as only youths properly know how to do.

It's not nearly as forgivable to do this in middle age, yet millions of men (and women) continue to make the same mistakes I made, leaving trails of bitterness and dead-ends in their wake.

By the time I had reached the next rise in the road, there was no point in looking back. My inner fog had escaped during my mid-life crisis, erasing all traces of who I had been or where I had come from.

Now I was on my own, creating my own destiny, freed from whatever vestiges of my upbringing had accompanied me into middle age, a free man at last.

Whenever I consider writing a memoir, first I must confront this foggy past, and try to find my way back through all of the confusion and broken memories to a place when I was much more pure, when the choices I made didn't carry such slicing consequences, break such innocent hearts, and doom my future course to a path where any joy would have to intermingle with the rain of bitter tears.

It turned out to be pretty much a rerun of my first movie, not a sequel. Until it came to one big part -- the role of father to three new young children.

Through my second painful divorce, with any hope of a stable financial future torn and shredded like so many old unwritten poems, discarded along my way, I finally grew up, I suppose, and recognized what responsibility really entails.

I don't pretend to have any wisdom now. Look elsewhere for that, dear reader. And if you are still young, go ahead and act like it.

Otherwise, you may steal that chance from another young man or woman, waiting to play whatever role is left for them, once you finally move out of their way.

-30-


* self-appointed, naturally