I’m about to turn 58, and whatever remnant of youth that remained in my life and allowed me to brush aside any serious thoughts of my end game, is now gone. While I am not yet elderly I am clearly not young, and I’m fast approaching the end of middle age. It has all gone so quickly, and randomly, that more often than not it pains me to look back at my life.
Not that Fortune hasn’t smiled upon me. She has, and often. And it’s one of my many flaws not to take a proper accounting of that. But I feel with a greater urgency that my days are now numbered. My life, having been finite all along, now feels finite. The inevitablity of death has been there all along, but now has taken on a physicality of its own, such that I can sense its presence.
Not knowing how much time is left, and what proportion of that time will be useful rather than marginalized, I feel compelled to make the most of it. And so it’s time to plan.
I just finished reading an accounting of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic adventure on board the Earnest, and found it riveting. The ability of all 28 men to have survived such unimaginable hardship, minus a few toes, in the face of such unimaginably terrible odds. Truly amazing, especially since I would have undoubtedly died a thousand times over during their odyssey, and would have scarcely made it a month following their abandonment of the ship forever caught in the Weddell Sea. Shackleton was a truly exceptional figure, a driven man out for adventure and, intentionally or not, out to make the most of his life. It would be nice to emulate his drive, to whatever extent that I can, with whatever time I have left. So here we go.