16.2 miles

This past week, a few new realities have turned what is left of this life into something I am having difficulty wanting to pursue.  

With most whom I knew to be family either in serious life-threatening health conditions or who have already passed away, my image of the future has been reduced to a landscape where life as I've known it is unsustainable. 

Last week I managed to walk 16.2 miles for exercise, a milestone for someone who has avoided traditional exercise outside of working for most of my years. Don't know if any of it helps but it does give me something to do to keep from dwelling on the things my mind insists on going back to. 

Although I didn't need the reminder, some news the past few days tapped me on the shoulder as if I had been asleep and hadn't noticed that life is so very short and impossible to predict. That any minute can be our last and that what life was like yesterday might have been the last day it seemed worthwhile. Two more people I'm close to are struggling with serious health issues. 

We have funerals for people who we love who pass away yet there is no formal service for those who are still living and who simply choose to step out of our lives. Each day on my walks I have wondered what would happen if I were to have a heart attack or stroke and someone felt the need to call someone who may want to know. But there really doesn't feel like there is anyone.

Recently when I was filling out forms for new insurance there was a space to fill in for who to notify in case of emergency and it was another stark reminder that it's just me now so I wrote, God. There is no one left who might call and get no answer and wonder where I was or how I was doing. No job that would be concerned that one of the most reliable people who ever worked for them just didn't show up and didn't call. 

This is where I would usually say it's kind of sad, but it is what it is, but no, it is in fact, pretty sad to have lived six decades and find myself where there isn't anyone left to be notified if I were gravely ill or dead in the street. This is what life is like with true peace and quiet but without the peace.

So here's to all who find themselves in the 4th quarter of life where you seek peace and calm only to find quiet and regret. There are likely millions in this same place and it doesn't take a lot of effort or time to be that one person someone needs to make them feel they are not forgotten, and cared for and that they exist beyond the silence that surrounds them. 

Think I'll go for a walk.. 

the theory of my relativity

It's taken a year to get down to business with re-writing my "final copy," of my previously re-written some dozen times or so Will. You want to do this while you can still remember and categorize the people that were in your life while you were here and those who weren't.. If you fail to get this done when you are alive, the state will do it for you when you're dead without any knowledge of what your preferences might have been. 

My unique and mostly solitary lifestyle never seemed as odd to me as it did to others throughout my years and while there were a few folks around from time to time all of them would eventually walk away. I was married at 17, a parent at 18, and with a knock at my door from a process server and my wife and son 10 feet away, I was to be divorced at 21. 

A ton of life some good and a lot bad between those years and these yet here I am now some 40 plus years later having learned some great lessons and suffered some hellish consequences all self-inflicted. Throughout all these years I've spent a lot of time analyzing why it all happened and how I managed to do rather well despite my attempts to de-rail my own efforts. Divine intervention and guidance are all I can figure out. 

Friends, jobs, relationships, hazy times some fun and others life-threatening, all of these things would have one consistent dynamic that I learned most of my life lessons from that I still tap into today and it was this, no matter what I received from or gave to an experience, they all had a clock if you will, a time span, and that clock would run out leaving me alone to figure it all out. 

Having basically quit high school in the 10th grade only to come back a couple days a week to the classes my cute little blonde girlfriend was in, I wasn't expected to accomplish much. I learned to lean on my refusal to take no for an answer and a strong determination to show all those who walked away from me that I would somehow find a way to make it on my own and I have to say I did pretty damn well in the end. 

But while enormous success in some areas is something I'm proud of, not all the parts of my life can I look back on without regrets. There is far more to life than working and investing and being able to retire early and those other things I wasn't so good at hold a lot of my regrets today. While trying to make an effort not to constantly beat myself up over things I fell short on, it's really easy to feel like that is exactly what I should be doing. 

All these dots get connected in a weird way when writing and re-writing a will and that precipitated this blog/rant. Am I being fair, is this enough, should I include so in so, etc. What it comes down to for me is sorting out who refused to walk away from me and my life despite the circumstances, AND, who walked or ran and don't know or care if I'm alive at this minute or already dead and I know everyone's names.. Maybe others have dozens of people who stuck by them no matter what over the course of a lifetime but for me, I have only 2 or 3 and feel damn grateful to have even just those. Feeling blessed.    

Writing a will for me was an exercise in remembering those who made a difference who may not even know that they did and those who ended up a waste of my time and energy. My mom was the only human being who never for one second ever left my side even when I wasn't deserving of her. I had some low points as most of us who have lived much do and I know I disappointed her in some of the decisions I made before I grew up but she forgave me instantly and without judgment or condition and was proud of me as I grew up and learned my lessons and now I can die a very satisfied old man knowing my angel thought I was a better son than I gave myself credit for. 

What I have in the Will is going to all the right places and hopefully will make God and my mom feel good about the decisions. Mom loved animals and kids and the friends who stood by me when they didn't have to and she would hear all about it from me when the people I thought I knew turned out to be something else. So the right people and places will benefit from what I was able to pile up from some of my best decisions and I feel very confident mom is smiling about it. 

My advice to others is to purge some of your accumulated stuff from your life so others won't have to do it not knowing where you might have wanted things to go and get that Will written, updated, and filed with the state before it's too late and then the state distributes things for you..