The weekend before Thanksgiving, I finally tested for black belt.
This is not a small test. And I’ve been working up to it for not a small amount of time. Without getting wrapped up in details, it’s two days, involves hours of cardio and hours of combat and technical testing.
But I’m not really posting about the test; I’m posting about my knees.
I went into the test knowing I had old knees that weren’t getting any younger. I left the test barely able to walk.
It’s now more than two weeks later and I still can’t properly walk. My gait is strange and my knees won’t hold weight in all positions and there is some pain and some numbness and some popping and clicking.
The dog that wants to walk 5-9 miles a day is increasingly frustrated with our single-mile days since then. If that.
Yes, yes, I’ll get myself to the doctor at some point. Right after the test I wasn’t sure how bad things were and then by the time it was clear it was Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving weekend and then yes, we’ve had a week after that, but my work life these days is in that space where you say “at least I have a job” as everyone around you is losing theirs, and as a result you really don’t want to take a lot of time for extacurriculuars like calling and/or going to see a bunch of specialists about knees that got messed up by your own personal hobbies that have no bearing on work.
And that last part is important because work is the purpose of life and you really have no excuse to put it in jeopardy and reduce it in any way, and if you do you really have no business hanging on to your job, and if you don’t hang on to your job, you won’t eat and also won’t be able to get medical care anyway so it’s all moot.
I don’t exactly know what in that statement exactly went wrong or where exactly it went wrong. I’m not even sure it’s wrong. I’m not sure about anything any longer.
There was a time when I had a doctorate and considered myself very bright and well-read and I could code in many languages and I had written many books (I just initially typed this as boox, not sure why) and I was bright, bright, bright, but not now.
Oh no, not now. I don’t know if it’s age or if it’s the general tenor of the world in which we currently live, but I’m now an idiot. An idiot of the first order. Day by day, more and more, I really don’t understand anything, anything at all ever and ever again, amen, amen.
I mean to say that I’m really a completely lost fucking lost sheep, I think and I’m just bewildered by work, by life, by parenthood. Is this all how it’s supposed to work? because it doesn’t seem like it really works all that well, but what do I know. Nothing. I’m just some schmoe like all the the other schmoes out there right now trying and failing to pay their bills while simultaneously trying and failing to “live in the moment” or to “put first things first.”
— § —
But I (aggressively) digress.
I am aging. Some people have asked me why I did the black belt test right now this year, this time, if I thought my knees weren’t in great shape just now and the answer of course is becasue they’re not getting any younger.
I can feel myself entering that time in life when things don’t really ever ‘heal’ fully ever again. I haven’t been here before, but when I was young I saw it on older relatives and on other older folks in my circles, who seemed ancient to me then.
But I can feel it now. I know it’s happening. I took the black belt test now because the knees were never going to get better than they already were, because what they most fundamentally are, beneath and beyond anything else, is old.
I saw a window closing. It’s been closing for a while. I’ve missed black belt tests for a couple of years now because I wanted to do this with my son and he keeps breaking bones and then healing up right at the times that made testing impossible (he’s still young, so this thing called ‘healing’ can still play out in his world) but I saw a window closing. I saw a window closing.
And the fact that my knees are fucked up now and I almost can’t walk, and that I don’t know if this gets any better, and that I don’t know what doctors are going to tell me but I think it probably won’t be all that great, isn’t really an argument that I shouldn’t have done this, but that it was good that I did it now, while I still could, because how would things have been next year, or the year after, with my knees not getting any younger?
My knees feel older and older. My lungs feel older and older. My back and my neck feel older and older. It’s a pretty big ordeal now to drive my second car, the one without the backup camera, when I have to back up and in order to do so I have to turn around while holding the wheel and physically look to the rear with my own eyes. That shit hurts. It hurts.
Forgive the four-letter words, but when you’re talking about getting older, at some point, some four-letter words need to come into it or you’re not being honest and/or you’re not really doing yourself justice.
— § —
I’ve always thought to one extent or another about things like legacy and impact and what I want to get done before I die and all those sorts of things.
I was one of those kids that was making a bucket list by the time I was a pre-teen and that was actively working on my bucket list, as a bucket list, throughout my twenties and thirties.
I’m one of those lucky people that actually did everything on my bucket list. (Well, not quite. There’s one more thing—to write and publish a novel—that I need to get to, but everything else has been done.)
So the fact that I’m talking about legacy and impact right now isn’t about bucket listing or the 50,000 foot view of “what was the purpose of my life” or “what will I leave behind.”
At this point that’s mostly baked and I mostly know what it is, and while I’m not 100 percent satisfied with the state of things, it’ll have to do because there’s only so much flex in the (what, something like) 20 years or maye 25 that I have left, much of it destined to be on the less productive side relative to the first two thirds of my life.
No, I’m actually reflecting these days on the literal mechanics of departure. As in, wills, and passwords, and accounts left behind and what needs to be cleaned up and what needs to be put in place.
There are people in my life who think this is morbid and/or that it’s premature, but I can see, as I get older and feel my knees stop working and my lungs increasingly stop working and (on the data sheets from my doctors) my kidneys and my liver stop working and do on, that I’m aging.
I’m not getting any younger, and I’m well into that age group that routinely just drops dead of a heart attack without warning, and also very practically, it’s not clear to me that I’ll be better positioned (or able) to figure out how to “hand everything over” and how to “prepare to hand everything over” when I’m 70 than I am now.
I think if I leave it until I’m 70, or maybe even if I leave it until I’m 60, it just won’t get done, because I won’t have the energy to do it.
— § —
That’s a thing. That’s a real thing worth flagging, though I hate to do it and it won’t earn me any girlfriends.
Energy.
I can feel the energy dissipating. I don’t feel like I did when I was 20 or even when I was 30 or even when I was 40.
Because I’m not 20 or 30 or 40.
I’m just about 50 (if I passed my black belt test, which I won’t know still for a little while, then I’ll basically get it for my 50th birthday) and counting.
In everyone’s life there are a small handful of moments that you remember, and a smaller handful still that are you remembering moments when someone said something to you that stuck, that had an impact, and that you can still hear them saying in your mind’s eye years later.
One of these for me (and this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned it here) is hearing my dissertation chair, who was already of retirement age or even older when I was wrapping up my Ph.D., tell me that he still had a full calendar and a lot of projects in his mind to launch because, in his words, “I still have a lot of energy!”
I hear him say that line in my head louder and louder with every passing year because it stands in such stark contrast to how I feel as I’m aging. With every year, month, week, day I feel the energy draining away from me. I watch it go and I feel a kind of panic along with a kind of resignation.
But no, I do not ‘have a lot of energy’ in the way that he talked about and I routinely wonder ‘how long I can keep doing this’ at the end of a workday, or at the end of a taekwondo session, or at the end of a long drive, or when working on a car, or when doing a home improvement project, or anything at all really.
I wonder it because I can feel it. I can feel it leaving me mentally, and I can feel it leaving me physically.
It’s not ‘I still have a lot of energy.’
It’s ‘How long can I keep doing this?’
— § —
Now, on a different but adjacent note, this all makes me wonder if there is a hidden key here that I should be paying more and more attention to. It is this:
Life fit.
As in, does your life fit you? Is it the right life for you? Are you living the right life or not?
Because I find myself thinking that it may be that he still had a lot of energy because he was doing work that he wanted to do and that he had always planned to do, while I am doing work that I didn’t really plan to do, didn’t really anticipate signing up for, and that doesn’t really do anything spiritual or deep for me.
Much of my life is just work.
Yes! Oh yes, the ‘going through the motions’ cliche. But of course that undersells it. We’re not all going through the motions because we’re idiots, we’re going through the motions because:
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We have significant needs and responsibilities
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We have a set of motions that can meet these
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We do not seem to have other sets of motions that are readily available that will meet those needs
So we ‘go through the motions,’ yes, and we feel regret about it, but on behalf of the ‘going through the motions’ crowd I feel that it’s incumbent upon me to say that this is not a low IQ thing we’re doing despite the perception, which is accurate, that everyone including the cheapest Hallmark movie and the bum outside the Seven Eleven knows that ‘going through the motions’ is not what you’re supposed to be doing with your life because life is too short to waste and you only get one of them and so on.
And yet here we are. A lot of very intelligent, very hard-working, very perceptive, and in some cases even somewhat wise people are going through the motions.
And getting older.
This was a post about getting older.
— § —
So I’m not really able to walk right now. And there is a strange paradox that could play out; it could well be that in the end:
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As I age, physical fitness is more and more important
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I got more serious about physical fitness over the last decade than I’d ever previously been in my life
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The culmination of all this physical fitness was a physical fitness event
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That may end physical fitness for me for the rest of my life and mark the transition from “middle age” to “older” (the ‘euphemism’ form of ‘old’)
I may have sacrificed my ability to do martial arts (or indeed, to walk) in order to get a black belt in martial arts.
There’s a kind of poetry there, but not good enough poetry that you’d write it down or ever bother to read it again once you had.
But it is what it is.
— § —
Last note in this whole aging thing is about friends.
I reach the point in my life where I start to think about what the end of my life will look like, and whether I really know very many people and whether I will really end up alone most of the time staring at a television set that now mostly shows nothing (the television set because like all people who age, and who start to creep into ‘aged’, I am set in my ways and the ways of my generation are, to a significant degree, television; showing nothing because already there is nothing on television and television is mostly dying, and by the time we get another decade behind us I’ll be old and television will probably finally actually just be YouTube, which isn’t television, or whatever comes after YouTube, which also won’t be television).
Anyway… Digressing. Always digressing. This is also a sign of age.
Yes, I have friends. And one of the things I’m most grateful for over the last month, as I have been stumbling around mostly unable to walk, is my friends.
Not becasue they have been here carrying me around the house or bringing me soup or anything (most, though not all, of them don’t even live in Utah).
No, I’ve been grateful for them because this month we’ve talked rather a lot, myself and several of my friends, more than has historically been the case (this in part because I’m often not great as a friend at communication and staying in touch; over the course of my life I was first too busy working on bucket lists and have in recent years then been too busy working on all the things that don’t matter in the aforementioned ‘going through the motions’ genre of regrets).
But my friens will still take a call from me when I reach out. And when I talk to them, I still find that they are just lovely. It is lovely to have friends. I am a fool for not talking to them more.
I don’t exactly know what the next (and likely last) 20-25 years will bring (assuming I even have that long; it’s entirely possible that I don’t).
But I hope that:
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The black belt test comes back as a ‘pass’
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My lungs hold out, because though I’ve always assumed that someday when I eventually die it will be of lung trouble
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I end up able to walk properly again, by one method or another
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I end up able to do taekwondo again someday (though this is mostly a nice-to-have compared to the rest)
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I remember to stay in touch with my friends and tell them things about my life and ask them things about their life
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They will continue to indulge me even though I don’t always remember to reach out as often as I should, and even though in some cases they have significant others that they really ought to be investing most of their time in
— § —
Meanwhile, it’s getting late; we wasted most of tonight on silly technical stuff (see previous post) and I’m getting older, and what’s more, I can’t see how long this post is because of the device I’m writing it on.
So this is the end of the first post I’m making in quite a while (something that’s just this moment dawned on me).
New year’s resolutions (so far):
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Put some of the first ‘mechanics of the end of my life’ in place somehow—passwords for people to find, codes to safes, last wishes, etc.
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Post more frequently on this thing, and contribute more often to all of my realms of writing and recording, since I think, bucket list complete, that’s really what the next 20 years are about… not uploading myself to the cloud for preservation like Elon Musk things, but really just preserving myself in notes and recordings
I’m becoming simpler as I age. I’m becoming simpler and realizing that most of this, maybe even 90-95 percent of this (this being the realm of modern economic productivity and public social life) is utter bullshit and we’ve all been fooled and cheated.
We’ve all been fooled and cheated and we should fucking throw drinks in the plantation owners’ faces and then just go hang out with our friends and family and tell them all how much we love them.
End of story.
(For tonight.)