under the milky way

Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might've known what you would find
And it's something quite peculiar
Something shimmering and white
Leads you here despite your destination
Under the Milky Way tonight

There are days that those lines above are pretty much my favorite song lyrics ever. Days? Moments? Time measurement is a strange thing. In my youth I was often fond of saying "time is a human invention" while having no idea what I meant. But when you are young, high, insecure and narcissistic, you sometimes fancy yourself a philosopher. Fuck it, I'm sure I stole it. I think it's true though. And it's better than the crap I uttered when I fancied myself some kind of shaman in those days. Bad poetry, man, bad poetry...

I'm in my early forties. There's a good chance my life is half over, or close to it. I think of that a little more than I'd care to admit. I don't believe in a midlife crisis, but I am beginning to understand why such things happen and why some people just blow up their lives and try to recapture something they've lost. That's the thing though...you can't recapture days gone by (yeah, I'm a fountain of cliches this evening. Apologies in advance. This is going to be an odd post.)

Strangely, I felt actual nostalgia more when I was younger. What I feel now, sometimes, is a yearning for a certain purity of emotion. That's the thing they don't tell you about wisdom--it tempers everything, as it should. I'll never have that falling in love feeling again, or that feeling when I first held my daughters, or that feeling when I lost my mind temporarily and ended up in the hospital (that one I don't miss.) I'm good with all that. Because I experience a different kind of emotion now, feelings tempered with that knowledge of "this, too, shall pass" be it wonderful or agonizing or somewhere in between. This emotion may not be deeper than the youthful emotions, yet it often feels that way. Calibrated to where I'm at on the human lifespan, perhaps. 

But. There has to be a but, right? Yeah, always. Some days I feel that too much emotion is blocked off in the daily noise of life and its responsibilities. It's not that I want to take drugs and paint all day. But I do wish I could just lay with my lover sometimes and not have the demands of the world direct our time. Or that I could talk again of my dreams, that kind of late night conversation with people close to you that bonds you on the deepest level. Such things came much easier as a youth. Today they are near impossible to come by, sometimes due to circumstance and responsibility, sometimes because it's harder to get out of your own way.

Youth is wasted on the young. But I don't want to go back there.

Yeah, I'm older. I was never a looker but I'm harder on the eyes now. There's a bit of beer gut. I've learned that some of my dreams are truly out of my reach. I get sucked down by ennui. I don't know where I'm going or what I'm looking for.

But you know what? I'm older. I've got experiences of different colors and learnings from those experiences under my belt--and that's a waistline expansion that need not stop. My candle doesn't burn at both ends because I am more emotionally mature and I've got a few tricks for dealing with my various demons. I treasure the moments I have instead of desperately reaching for the next one. I don't know where I'm going or what I'm looking for.

So what? Bring it.

Bring it for each moment I'm still fortunate enough to breathe. For each moment I get impossibly sad or ecstatically happy. For every moment between those poles of emotion and all the other emotions. Bring it for the loss and the wisdom. Bring it as my body changes, the aches pile up and old dogs learn new tricks. Bring it for letting go of all that baggage that weighed my youth down. Bring it on the days I can't handle it and on the days that I can. Bring it for every joke, every laugh and everything I forget. Bring it for the ghosts and the cats and the kids and the wife and the friends and the words and the songs. Bring it for Indy saying "It's not the years, it's the miles." Bring it for creativity. Bring it for gazing into the night sky and being awestruck and wordless at the vastness, the beauty of this universe as much now as at 10, 20, 30, 40.

Bring it, bring it, bring it!