“Forty," Victor Hugo wrote, "is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.” To which Arthur Schopenhauer added, “A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.”
Point is, that somewhere between 55 and 65: life's climb gets heavy. But we can't just stop... Well the thought's unbearable. And too often, home's up there somewhere, from where we came down so easily. You know, maybe we waddled down to idle on some beach? So what now? Just getting anywhere nowadays means climbing. Rats...
Well now my boots are weighted down with age and the next landing's... Damn, I'm only halfway! And since men don't whine, I can only wonder when I stumbled through maturity into shuffling?
How many steps from where I am now... until I become a member of Generation Dodder? Schopy was right... my heart's in rebellion. "Ka-Thump!" it says as each step gets a little heavier. Okay... the one-way doors to God's Waiting Room aren't anywhere in my sight... yet. But I'll tell ya'. After a jostling this month riding a bus for days through Morocco... well - my tourings are over.
From here on, from point A to point Zed, it's either helicopters or cruise lines. This month, the vast continental interiors slammed closed. Bye-bye Heart of Darkest Mongolia, I'll YouTube you.
