Turning 60!

I’m writing on the occasion of my 60th birthday, December 4, 2024. We ascribe a special significance to those birthdays that begin a new decade. Something in us needs a marker, a milestone, a number with a zero at the end. We like that. I think it’s true that the last time I wrote about a birthday was ten years ago and I was 50. I wonder what I said then–my curiosity gets the better of me and I have to look it up. It turns out that ten years ago I began in almost the exact same way, by musing about the significance of even numbers ending in zero, new decades. So at first glance, nothing has changed. My 50 year old self, in characteristic fashion, spoke of his fears and doubts, his shortcomings, nagging questions about his health and happiness, but turned quickly toward greener pastures, wiser words from his better devil about what there is to be grateful for in the past and hopeful for in the future, but realizing too that what’s most important is the here and now, “doing the best that I can do right this minute.” So, in following the advice from that better devil from ten years ago, I am writing this prose poem, a poem I scratched out first in a barely decipherable scrawl, handwritten, because some dear friends gifted me a brand new writing notebook for my birthday, a poem that is really turning out more like an essay, an essay whose composition moved pretty quickly from handwriting in a notebook to the keyboard of a laptop. This is the best that I can do right this minute.

The new decade, beginning as it does for me 27 days before the new year, seems more appropriately a time for resolution, more so than the game we play every New Year’s Eve of expressing our hopes and goals for the upcoming 365 days. It feels different to think in terms of another decade, especially one that will bring me closer to what can be truly or more accurately called “old age”–it’s all relative, right? Weighty (a word I used to describe turning 50 ten years ago). I must confess that, as a retired person, with time on my hands and fewer external expectations and obligations, more often lately I have been asking myself the biggest of questions with a little more urgency: What do I want? First, perhaps, comes the equally gigantic question: what DON’T I want?–especially regarding those things that are within my control–which ultimately, of course, add up to none or very close to none. Notwithstanding, I realize, that no matter my luck moving forward in terms of avoiding macro and micro disasters, that I have choices. I have agency. I don’t want to lose that agency. I don’t want my brain or my body (as much as I can help it) to atrophy. I don’t want to stop making things. I don’t want to be lonely. I don’t want to be invaluable or irrelevant. I don’t want to be a tool to commercial and corporate America. I don’t want to be a cog in the machine.

One thing’s for sure, I’m not going into the woods–although, I have thought about it, but I love Thoreau’s rationale from Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

I will attempt to describe my own wish to live “deliberately.” That is the operative word, isn’t it? It’s like that other great word that has become almost a cliché now in overuse: “intentional.” And another one of my favorite words, a close relative to these first two: conscious. To live deliberately. To live with intention. To live consciously. That’s what I want. But what does that even look like? For Thoreau, living in the woods meant stripping away everything that was not essential. Remember? “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” This is an exceedingly difficult thing to do for modern Americans and difficult for me personally. Must I jettison all my stuff in order to live deliberately? I was talking with a friend some weeks ago now about our shared enthusiasm for tiny houses. She built one on the coast and lives there part time, but she told me I could not do it. And the one detail that convinced her of the impossibility of that kind of life for me was the fact that I have seven pairs of glasses. She didn’t even mention my record and book collections and drum sets and recording gear. My glasses, my records, my books, and the gear in the studio are highly prized possessions–and I don’t really feel like they clutter my life, but rather, enrich it. And yet, could I move from seven to two pair? Could I digitize the entire record and cd collection and carry it with me on a thumb drive? Could I read any book on my shelves any time I wanted on an iPad or by checking it out from the public library? Could I shrink the studio? Yes to all of these things. Would this be better? I don’t know. But even if I decided on this kind of life, other aspects of my current situation would road block the entire enterprise. I am in a partnership, after all–the other half of which needs this big house, the baby grand piano, the basement studio, for her livelihood! My 19 year old son needs a place to rest his head. No tiny house living for me! I do realize, though, through these observations and through the experience with aging and then dying parents, that eventually, the stuff will have to go. And it would be unkind to burden my son with that task. So I imagine, then, that the next decade will have to consist of some significant winnowing. This will need to be deliberate, intentional, conscious. But that can’t be the whole story. Yes, things will by necessity be let go, left behind, but I still feel young, vital, as though there is much living left in my future, more to take on than to drop off, at least experientially, if not materially.

I feel like I have written myself into a corner. Almost as if I have talked myself out of any kind of ambitious drive to live any other way. Not that there’s anything wrong with the way I am living. It’s a good, lucky, privileged life that needs tweaking here and there. Nevertheless, there is this feeling that in my last few decades of living, I’d like to be brave. I’d like to do something radical or transformative. I want an adventure. Somehow it feels not enough to simply keep on keeping on: doing my little scribbling, making my little songs, listening to music, taking care of this property and this building, figuring out what’s for dinner, doing the laundry over and over and over again, picking up after the dogs.

So, given that I am not an independent contractor in this life, that I no longer have a job that provides a sense of responsibility and purpose, that my time is almost exclusively my own, and while some of the above constraints keep me from moving out into the woods, what does it mean for me to live deliberately, intentionally, and consciously, and how am I doing?

Frankly, I don’t think I’m doing very well. And yet, I know that I must be kind to myself. I am, after all, doing the things I want to do. I am writing fiction and poetry and essays. I am writing and recording original music. I am playing the drums on a regular basis with other musicians. And I am taking care as best I can of my friendships and social connections. In all of these essential and, to me, life-giving activities, I have been and will continue to be productive. And that is part of the way I am choosing to live deliberately and intentionally. However. However, I find myself distracted by and my attention easily pulled away by stupid stuff, mostly having to do with our digital age and the internet and the stupid smart phone. Every time I pick up my phone, I have the nagging suspicion that this choice is not a deliberate one, not intentional, and certainly not conscious. While I have, as I have said, been productive in doing more of the things I want to do, sometimes I imagine what I might be able to do if I was not so easily pulled away. What kinds of progress might I make on my creative endeavors? Or what other kinds of development, intellectually or spiritually, might I experience if I was less distracted? How many more books could I read? How much more would I be able to invest in my physical health? Getting back to our good friend Henry David Thoreau, his main complaints about the chaos and busyness and “progress” of the 19th century are more apt now than they have ever been, with a difference: through the magical conveyance of the super computer that fits into the palm of our hands, people move now and are constantly “busy” without getting out of their chairs. Thoreau complained about the post-office and the railway and the news as his society’s biggest wastes of time. I think Henry didn’t know the half of it. Of course he didn’t. How could he? But still, everything he says about his 19th century still speaks volumes about ours. Walden is still a very good antidote. It should be reread every year. I have to keep reminding myself, though, that eventually Thoreau came out of the woods. Even he could follow his own advice only for a year or two.

So here’s my wish list for living the next chapters of my life more deliberately, intentionally, and consciously.

• I want to read a lot. Nothing disturbs me more about the aforementioned developments in technology: I know it has slowed my reading down to a crawl. I fear it’s making me dumber. And there seems to be only one remedy for that, and it’s the printed word, the discipline of reading cover to cover.
• I want to be less beholden to any technology that does not somehow advance better, more creative living. It’s interesting that I say “less” beholden. Wouldn’t it be best not to be beholden at all? But it is difficult, if not impossible, and maybe unnecessary to be a complete luddite in this 21st century. The goal is to use the tools, not be used BY the tools.
• I want a healthy relationship with the news of the day. I want to be well-informed, but I don’t want to be obsessed. Our current state of politics has the potential to absolutely drive me to despair and distraction. I must guard against that. I will do what I can in my small way to push back against the darkness, the corruption, the misinformation, the bullshit, and help martial in a new era, but it can’t be my driving force. I’m not that guy.
• I want to foster strong relationships with my loved ones, friends and family. It is important that as I age I hold my closest friends even closer. And it’s important that I more easily let go of relationships that have not been authentic or sincere or honest. One of my mistakes was to think that as I approached 60 those kinds of negative relationships would be firmly in the past. Not true. Just this year I’ve had to work exceedingly hard to let go of people who were not the friends I thought they were. It only takes a few seconds of reflection to know who my people really are–and I want to practice loving them more perfectly. I also want to develop new relationships, make new friends, form deeper connections–but it has nothing to do with numbers. I’d rather have 10 close friends than dozens of superficial ones.
• I want to have new experiences–and this one worries me a little, in that it feels that it might be all too easy to be complacent and to allow circumstances and fear to freeze up one’s sense of adventure. I don’t have a gigantic bug for travel, but I do feel a desire or a need to get out of my own backyard–literally and figuratively.
• I know there is much that sucks about aging. Right now my hands are starting to hurt and drumming might become more difficult. I’ve got a knee thing that comes and goes. I’ve got to be vigilant about my blood pressure. I’m taking pills now every day for that, and for the skin thing, this rosacea on my face that also comes and goes. All that being said, I want to ENJOY my aging. I want to revel in it a bit. More revelry and less complaining.
• I want to continue nurturing and developing my creative spirit. I want to fight against the impulse to conclude that it’s stupid at my age to continue writing music and writing books. The chances of being able to make a living at either of these enterprises might diminish with age, but one, I shouldn’t give up entirely on the possibility, and two, that’s not really the point, is it? I make things for the sake of making them. I make music and write books because I cannot do otherwise–and I am happy with that–not satisfied–but happy.
• Gratitude and wonder and curiosity and love and contentedness. If there were some vowels in there I could make an acronym–but these are the emotional centers out of which I would like to operate from here on out. The last one, contentedness, probably the most difficult. To be happy with where I am and what I have, to keep desire at bay, to know the difference between what I need and what I want, and, because I know that desire is not necessarily a bad thing, to know when and how often it’s okay just to have something or to do something just for the hell of it, just for pleasure’s sake or for fun. It feels to me like the above list of emotional nouns are a kind of equation. It’s simple addition, really. Any of those first four traits, gratitude plus wonder plus curiosity plus love, seem to point or add up to a sense of well-being, or contentedness.
• Finally, I want to move forward with authenticity. In my living and in my art, I will strive to be unapologetically who I am, to sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. Again, it’s easier said than done. I could point to places in my life, and recently, where I have kept quiet when I should have spoken, where I softened or censored my approach to some situation to avoid conflict or hurt or rejection, when I have shied away from the authentic out of fear of judgement. This requires a vigilance and bravery of the highest order. I want that for myself.

I wasn’t precisely accurate in my opening paragraph about the description of the “I’m Turning 50” blog entry from a decade ago. That essay opens with the words “Oh fuck.” The good news, I think, is that a phrase like that was not my first impulse this time, ten years down the road. I felt no need for expletives to describe my emotional state. It might be that I am less angsty about 60 than I was about 50. I can see that. It makes me happy. Both essays, however, reference Walden–another indication perhaps that a reread is in order, but also that Thoreau’s text, even though it has been twenty years since the first time I read it all the way through, and maybe as many years since I taught excerpts from it to my high school juniors, has stuck with me as a consistent companion. Maybe my conclusion this time around, a list of best wishes for the life of Michael Jarmer, is more specific and pointed, even if it’s still pretty close to where I was at 50. I’m trying to be a better Michael Jarmer and I don’t ever want to stop learning and growing. My good devils and my bad devils are still the same devils, but I think I’m on the way. I give myself a thumbs up. Not half bad, I say.