The Big Four-Six

Today's my 46th birthday, and though I haven't learned much in 46 years, I thought I'd pass along, for what it's worth and in no particular order, some of what I have learned:

1. Human beings are amazing creatures. So are trees. And microbes. And dolphins. And three-toed sloths. And just about everything else.

2. Everything in life is too complicated to be understood or solved. It can only be addressed.

3. Art is infinitely better than war, but it makes far less money for the powerful.

4. Nature is good. And civilization is good. And Nature is good for civilization. But civilization is not good for Nature.

5. Ethical decisions follow the same rules outlined in #2 above.

6. If God exists, s/he appears to be content largely to let us figure things out on our own.

7. Faithlessness and unfaithfulness are not the same. Being faithless means denying what you don't believe in. Being unfaithful means denying what you do.

8. The best things in life (love, happiness, purpose, freedom, etc.) are not free. You have to work far harder to achieve them than you do to buy stuff.

9. There is no such thing as good luck. There's only a.) hard work or b.) random chance. Take your pick.

10. In art, we approach the divine. In divinity, we approach art.

11. Life is far too short. But if it were any longer, we'd probably waste most of it.

So there you have it. By next year, maybe I'll have learned something new.

The Oddness of Forty-Five

Turned forty-five today. Lots of people are rocked by the decade birthdays, but those I seem to have taken in stride; they feel much more stable than the years in-between. Prime numbers are the worst; when you're forty-three, you're just forty-three. At least with forty-five, I can say I'm nine times five or fifteen times three.

I'm generally healthy (though with a clotting disorder that has to be managed medically), still in good shape, in fact stronger than I've ever been thanks to a regular exercise routine. Little things flare up now and again: some back problems last year, a sinus infection I just got over this winter. I've long since said goodbye to my hair (that's my dad's legacy), which had gone from black to virtually white (my mom's) before vanishing pretty much altogether. Still, I don't feel old, or even particularly older.

I remember my mom telling me years ago that she'd reached a point past which she'd stopped aging mentally even though she kept aging physically. In her mind, she said, she was still eighteen or twenty, in her body fifty or more. That's been my experience too--I suppose it's everyone's--and it's a strange thing, watching one's body grow alien to oneself. It explains why so many of us experience time passing more quickly as we age, at least in retrospect: since we tend to measure time by our memory of who we were, if the self we remember from twenty years ago is identical to the self we experience now, those twenty years might just as well have been a single moment. My childhood self seems a stranger, and the chasm of time between us immense; my twenty-five-year-old self seems like a guy I was just talking to yesterday, even if I can't quite remember the conversation we were having.

Forty-five is somewhere in the middle: not old, not young, half-hale. In half a decade I'll be half a century. Like many people at mid-age, I've been trying lately to come to terms with who I am, where I fit into things, what my life has been or could yet be worth. This blog has helped me to do that, as has my other writing, my job, my family, my activism. I don't expect the journey to come to an end anytime soon.

So, forty-five. When I blew out the candles tonight I set another piece of my life in stone, lost it at the same time.