The Human Experience: 53 and me.

This is my second attempt at this post.

On my first pass, I got a couple hundred words into a whole prosey soliloquy which sounded vaguely meditative and deep but was really just bullshit served with a nice frosting. One thing I’ve learned this year is that if I find myself quickly lapsing into flowering up the language like that, whatever I’m writing sucks.

A good cake doesn’t need food-colored roses. A shitty cake can’t be saved by them. If I’m all up in the frosting, I’m fucking up the cake.

In my first pass, I was all up in the frosting.

The reason is because I didn’t want to lead with the honest open:

Today was my birthday. Yet, I woke up sad and had a hard time shaking it.

I wasn’t full-on depressed. I was melancholy. Blue.

I think, subconsciously, I didn’t want to lead off this piece with admitting that because, honestly, I didn’t want to lead with it. Instead, I wanted to layer icing on top of it. I wanted to pretty up the surface before exposing the layers.

My first impulse was to 1) open all philosophical and thoughtful; 2) delve into this morning case of the sads; and then 3) take us up out of the doldrums to higher, happy ground. I got just about this many words into doing that and then deleted all of them and started over.

The all-cake-no-frosting do-over:

I woke up sad on my birthday. It lingered.

I can’t tell you why. There wasn’t a specific reason.

Big milestone moments always throw me into a pensive place. Birthdays. Anniversaries. New Years. Basically, important markers of time. They all trigger this impulse in me to pause and reflect. Take inventory of all that’s happened. Think about where I’ve been and am now. Reflect.

I like having that impulse. It tracks to Feeling My Life. Being present for it... Inhabiting its emotions fully and richly. I like those things. So I’ve always welcomed these appointments with reflection even when the reflection was hard or painful. In fact, I think I’ve welcomed them most when that was the case. They were appointments to mourn a chapter and then turn the page.

Today, ironically enough, my birthday arrived with me in the best place I’ve been in years… At least a decade. Maybe closer to two.

Professionally – occupationally - it arrived with me in the best place I’ve been in… well, possibly ever in my life. There were times in my career when I was really into my job, enjoyed it, and got satisfaction from it. None held a candle to how much soul-nourishing joy I get from being a writer.

In terms of where this birthday finds me, it doesn’t exactly call for a soundtrack of Ella Fitzgerald singing “My Melancholy Baby.”

Yet, there I was this morning sad-songing my way out to one of my quiet places and then restlessly driving around rather than parking.

In years prior, I would have parked and sat quietly for a while. I would have rolled down the windows and drank my coffee and listened to the sounds of the place. I would have settled into a sort of meditative calm and thought about the prior year and then exhaled as if to say “All of that happened. And now it is over. Now it is behind me.”

Today, I just wasn’t in that place. I was ill at ease and felt a nagging kind of down. So, instead of parking and sitting, I just drove around and listened to some music. No pause. No reflection. I just kept going. Then I drove home, picked up my son, and took him to the diner.

Late this afternoon, I ran out to get a haircut and then stopped by the pub to see if someone on the staff had her baby yet. She’s due tomorrow. While I was there having a pint, my son texted me to tell me that his soccer practice scheduled for Saturday had been canceled. Suddenly, we weren’t tied to being home tomorrow night anymore. Practice ends tomorrow at 10 a.m… and then he has the next day off.

In the space of five minutes, we hatched a plan to go away for the night. In the space of the next ten, I booked us a room in Philadelphia and made us a dinner reservation at a place we like. It all just... fell into place… in fifteen minutes.

As I was booking it, I thought “Okay, this is what we’re doing for my birthday….” I’m ecstatic. Couldn’t ask for a better birthday gift.

It was only after I had booked that one-day getaway that I got my arms around my early-day melancholy. The reason for it. The root of it.

To explain, I have to take you back to California with me for a minute. I will make it quick…

The first night my son and I were in the L.A. area, we stayed up in the hills above the city. I didn’t finish booking the hotels until we were actually on the plane. That first night’s hotel though… that one I had been booked before we even had flights.

I had waffled about literally every other aspect of the itinerary. Where we were staying that first night was practically preordained. Our trip was always going to start there.

It wasn’t because of the location per se. It wasn’t because of the hotel.

It was because of me.

It was because of this whole deep, complicated, personal thing which only I knew - because it was entirely internal to me.

It had to do with a line in a song, a stretch of shitty years, hitting one annual milestone after another, and at each one, stopping to do what I didn’t do today: reflect.

The song is “A Long December” by Counting Crows.

Jesus, I have bled to that damn song. When my mother-in-law was dying, the razor blade was the lines about “the smell of hospitals in winter / and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters / but no pearls.”

In the brutal stretch afterwards when my life felt like it was in freefall, every year just before New Year’s, I would listen to it again and just absolutely hang on the lines “It’s been a long December / but there’s reason to believe / maybe this year will be better than the last.” I would listen practically pleading with the universe to allow them to come true.

The song is a serious downer - it is a sorrowful lament - and that resonated when my life was the most sorrowful; but what really made it so personal, so anthemic for me, was that, in it, the narrator is doing exactly what I do by impulse: pausing at a milestone moment to reflect on hard things.

That pause to reflect happens up in the hills above L.A..

“We drove up to Hillside Manor / sometime after 2 a.m. / to talk about the year…”

I have no idea if Hillside Manor is even a place but the lyrics always reminded me of a drive I used to make often to visit a client. Head up the coast… turn inland… travel up the canyons to Topanga.

Whenever I listened to that song, I saw that drive, that place.

So, when my son and I were heading out there, on some deep visceral level, that is where I needed us to start our trip. I needed to go to the place I always pictured when that song was practically my soundtrack and I was pleading that ‘maybe this year will be better than the last.’ And I needed to go now because, finally, I’m past the plea.

After a damn hard run of ‘Long Decembers’, this time around, I was driving up to Hillside Manor happy in the year. That’s why I booked us up in the hills. To make that drive. To make it now. Happy. To make it with my son.

That is the reason I booked that hotel in that place. To make that drive. Because of what it meant to me and me alone.

I’m a lot. I know that. I am. Other people would be like “Oh, we stayed at the Crowne Plaza because it had a pool.” and I’m all like “Well, you see, there’s this song which was fairly excruciating for me to listen to for a good long while and it vaguely alludes to an area familiar to me so I always pictured that area when listening to the song so now, naturally, I must go to that place so as to complete a complicated emotional journey on my own terms.”

Okay, yes, that was a lot. I will admit that.

However, to me…. to me… it makes sense. It has meaning. It is an impulse that comes from a place I understand.

I don’t think we are ever fully freed from hard places until we can return to them at peace.

We can escape from them. We can flee them.

To be fully freed from them though, I think we have to be able to visit them again in health and leave them at peace.

That first night up in the hills above L.A. was exactly that for me; and it felt exactly as I thought it would. Joyful.

Bringing this all the way back around to my birthday blues today, the thing about all of that pausing and reflecting and long decembering and doleful dirging is that it is all retrospective. It is all looking backwards after pain or injury as an act of healing. That’s why it always felt so organic to me… so good… so welcome.

These deep meditative moments of reflection have always felt good among a lot of bad.

Today, I didn’t get the good, but the reason was because I’m not coming off of so much bad. I’m past when it was all a lot of oysters and no pearls. I don’t need the retrospective funerary to self-soothe.

This morning, I drove around feeling a little unmoored and uncomfortable because at this point, I’m entirely programmed to mark milestone dates with my personal version of a ‘drive up to Hillside Manor sometime after 2 a.m.’ to reflect on a tough year and hope that this year will be the one when things turn for the better.

This year was better than the last.

And that is something worth pausing to reflect on… but, being entirely honest with you, that’s a self-talk conversation I’ve forgotten how to have. I’m going to have to relearn.

Happiness, too, can be an adjustment.

I’m okay with that.