Bullet

It’s odd. Elder Sister turned 60 this week. It brings home just how close my own sixtieth is, and how much time I’ve already experienced. I can’t find any original words to describe the feeling this inspires, which is as profound, bittersweet and incredulous as any I’ve experienced. How did it come to this?

Reading that back to myself, it sounds completely trite, though that was specifically what I was trying to avoid. I suppose it’s inevitable that I would sound trite in this. What I’m feeling is what everyone feels eventually (though in my humble opinion, the whole “I’m turning thirty; my life is over” thing is completely jumping the gun). And since everyone else goes through it, I can only chastise myself for being taken by surprise.

What helps is that I like myself more than I ever did at any prior age. I never wanted to be one of those people who longed to go back and do it over again. Sure, if we play that hypothetical “if I could go back and redo one thing in my life, what would it be” game, I’d have an answer or two. The point isn’t that there aren’t things I regret, but that even with regrets I somehow ended up where I needed to be.

That said, I find I still lack perspective over this. I always thought that with the continued passing of time, it should feel like there would be less opportunity to form regrets, that I would finally be entering safer waters where decisions aren’t so momentous and mistakes so irrevocable. It feels just the opposite; the waters are more treacherous and each decision can make-or-break the rest of my life. Thinking about it, however, both what I expected and what I’m now feeling are equally wrong.

In ballistics, a fraction of a degree off in trajectory over a launch of miles is a huge mistake. I get hung up on this idea, insisting on using this analogy: you get shot off at birth , make mid-flight course corrections, and eventually land wherever those mid-flight corrections took you. That analogy deceives you into believing that decisions you made years ago inevitably led you to this day, this place, this situation.

It isn’t that the analogy is wrong, but it’s incomplete. I forget, time and again, that over a short trajectory, being a fraction of a degree off over a few feet makes minimal difference in where you land. Life is a series of short trajectories, not a single long one.

Each day is a new launch. You start off where you ended up yesterday, but tonight you land where you aimed for this morning, not where you aimed for yesterday. That’s important. That’s what I have to hang on to. The waters aren’t more treacherous, and the decisions I make today do not make-or-break the rest of my life any more than the decisions I made twenty, thirty, forty years ago did. Taken as a sum, my decisions describe how I’ve lived my life, but none of those decisions were singularly responsible for commanding my path.

That’s important.