Reminiscing

I met with an old colleague for an hour run on Saturday. I missed him and told him that our conversations in the office kept me working in the corporate world far longer than I intended to. I don’t miss the work, but I do miss some of the people.

The run started at a Grant's Trail entrance and looped around a half-mile hilly gravel path that we circled about ten times.

We both turned 40 this year and enjoy the endurance stuff in our spare time (although I am going shorter in distance these days). He told me that he went fishing with his son about a week ago and watched him reel in his first catch.

“That is a cool thing,” I said, “to experience all those first moments again you might’ve forgotten about, through someone else’s lens.” And suddenly, listening to that story, memories of my own childhood flooded my mind, of being at a pond in the dense Carolina woods with my brothers and casting our own fishing poles into the water.

We found ourselves talking about aging and how little sleep we needed as kids. I used to often stay up all night watching TV and playing Nintendo, even on weekdays. In high school I would stay up for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show or some hyperviolent anime, or just whatever was playing on SyFy channel. Sleep be damned. If I was a slave to the system during the day hours, the night was my time.

I couldn’t imagine myself doing that now. I’m the worst version of myself if I sleep for less than seven hours and as the Hulk would say, “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

I bring that up because we noted that 40 feels the same as 30, but if one looks backward carefully enough, the signs of change become more apparent. One doesn’t often notice the first stages of a cavity.

Then I think that yeah, I guess I don’t recover like I used to.

We were the last generation to grow up without phones, to require imagination for preventing boredom, and to lack social media. It’s easy to connect with someone over that experience.

What a great generation to grow up in. I believe that makes us lucky as hell.

Square One

Sometimes the best path forward is backward, one of those paradoxes you’d think only exist in a Lewis Carroll story. I’m not just taking a step backward these days. I’m sprinting towards what once was, but hasn’t been, but potentially could be again, if one resists the natural ebb and flow of things and swims toward the maelstrom.

I think of time and how deceiving and malicious it can be if one isn’t careful. Age 10 was both yesterday and three decades ago. A 10-year-old’s idea of sprinting down a sandy hill for the sake of feeling a cool breeze on the cheeks and the adrenaline rush of raw speed was enough to try something that an adult would consider dumb (because it’s unsafe, of course). A tumble and scraped knees were worth it. I think of trying to skateboard and drink coffee at the same time, and failing spectacularly at both.

Contrast that to adulthood, when movement is mostly calculated. We are tethered to a beaten path, a watch, a pace, and a “goal.” Even the trails are a set number of miles, a metric. The daily walk stays on a flat sidewalk, perfectly smooth, manufactured for the sake of comfort, a number of steps that a doctor says must be “hit.” Walking for the sake of “exercise.” Movement is a chore; you’re either sitting robotically or walking robotically. What adult yearns to hang upside down and study the clouds?

I try to find the spontaneous boy who thrived in random chaos. That person, I think, was waiting patiently, not dead but just in hibernation.

I go out on a brisk fall morning and run barefoot in the park. A few random sprints with no set interval or time, just the rush and fast twitch muscles activating. I wander through neighborhoods I hadn’t seen before and study the halloween decor in the lawns.

I drive to work listening to what I used to consider 90’s trash, Limp Bizkit, and think a metal show sounds like a great idea, just losing oneself in music, aggressive and fast music, cathartic music, anti-establishment stuff with machine-gun guitar riffs and banshee vocals.

It seems preferable to another day with a prescribed routine: a day that slashes routine to pieces.

We have a pumpkin painting activity at work, for team building, so I paint Art the Clown, the evil killer clown from the Terrifer films. Everyone else paints happy faces or just writes inside work jokes. Nothing left for wonder or awe.

I doubt I won the contest, but I know I created a nightmare or two.