If you don’t want more and aren’t worried about losing what you have, either you have nothing and aren’t aware there is anything, you have everything and there’s nothing left to achieve, or you’re dead.
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
So begins Dante Alighieri’s immortal Inferno, about one man’s journey through hell on the long path to heaven. Even in the context of the epic poem, there is the sense that the author was referring to more than a literal forest or even a literal hell, but rather the nature of the aging process. As we find ourselves pondering the second half of our lives, we look to the past and see the person we were – young, full of dreams, ambition, desires, and the feeling that we have all the time in the world to achieve them – and consider that the future is perhaps a lot shorter than we thought to do so. We might still hold true to some of the dreams of yesteryear, but have necessarily abandoned many as well, knowing that for good or ill, we made different choices and life took a different direction. If we are lucky, that direction brought with it new dreams to replace the old. Regardless, we all must face the reality that time is slipping away and even harder choices are upon us about how we wish to spend the rest of our lives – which dreams we will continue to pursue and which we must necessarily forego forever. There is the further sense that these choices will become more numerous and more frequent, taking on a greater importance because we know each choice also matters more than ever if only because we will not have the time to unwind it and make another. If we don’t do it now, are we ever going to get the chance again? Dante envisions this turning point as being lost, unable to see either the past or the future clearly, and imagines that he must undertake an epic journey to find redemption. He was also dead at 56, meaning he was mid-way upon the journey of his life at 28. Barring some unforeseen accident or suddenly tragic turn of events – not exactly an impossible thought considering I’m going skiing tomorrow for the second time in 15 years and on the first, I fell so freaking hard my left thigh was a yuge black and blue for several weeks – I’ll turn 50 on Friday, probably a bit past the mid-way point, perhaps just far enough beyond to realize it and truly understand what the great Italian poet was talking about in a way impossible when I was younger.
To be sure, my life is far from a dark wood. If you had told my younger self, the sort of life I would lead and the things I would enjoy at 50, he would’ve asked where to sign and thanked his lucky stars. I am married to a beautiful, smart, and mild woman in an amazing relationship to the point where I don’t really want to go anywhere without her. She is how I interact with the world. I don’t have any children of my own, but my wife has four and we just welcomed our third grandchild into the world, a baby boy after two girls, barely a week ago. We live in a beautiful house on three acres in the little known horse farm country of northwest New Jersey, complete with a pool, a hot tub, and a fire pit. In my garage, less than ten feet from where I type, there is a Porsche SUV, a BMW roadster with a stick, and a purpose built Porsche racecar, which technically belongs to my brother, but possession is nine tenths of the law as they say. A car fanatic since I was a kid – my mom always said the first thing I ever wrote worth a squat was a short story in sixth grade about the legendary Porsche 959 – I get to race these things now for real rather than merely dream about them and instruct beginners in the sport at the once legendary Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ, sharing my love and hopefully, hardwon wisdom with others. I have a good career, one that not only pays the bills, but has sent me around the country and the world to India three times and the United Arab Emirates once, and have also been fortunate enough to pursue my extracurricular passions. In addition to performance driving, I’ve made three independent movies, five short films, written three unproduced screenplays, three novels, and over a 1,000 posts on this blog. Beyond my marriage, job, and hobbies, I have a close knit family, my mom, two older brothers and a younger sister, and close friends since high school along with a whole lot of acquaintances. At this point in my life, a free weekend with nothing to do except spend time with my wife might well be my ideal – amazing how not having anything to do on a Friday night is a horror in high school and college, something to be wished for as you age – but it’s more of a rarity than anything else. There’s always something going on, even when I might prefer there isn’t. Before summer even officially begins, I’ll have gone racing at Watkins Glen, spent a week in Puerto Rico, and seen Bruce Springsteen once, if not twice if I have my way and my wife doesn’t force me to sell floor seats at Barclays, in addition to skiing, go karts (a reasonable winter substitute for actual car racing), instructing at the track a couple of times once it opens, visits to see the grandkids, and travel for work. Once summer does begin, who knows where life will take me?
I don’t write any of this to brag. As I’ve said more times than I can count, it’s often better to be lucky than good and I’ve certainly been fortunate. Otherwise, I was gifted with a naturally energetic if not restless nature that renders me unable to sit still for more than a few minutes and a rather freakish brain that combines a good memory with the ability to rapidly consume large amounts of information and regurgitate it faster than most, as you can probably tell from my posts. I write it instead to illustrate one of the ironies of life and the aging process in general. I’m happy, fulfilled in all of the ways that should matter, and not the kind of person that spends all that much time worrying about what I don’t have and didn’t do, not prone to anxiety or stress or anything of the sort. I have almost everything I dreamed about as a kid, more in a lot of ways, and yet there still remains a part of me that simply wants even more – of everything, even if there wasn’t much I could do with it anyway. Moreover, I don’t think I’m unique in this regard or the underlying reasons why. I’m frequently reminded of an old quip in The Simpsons, when Ralph tells Mr. Burns he’s the richest man he knows. Mr. Burns replies as only he could, yes, but I’d trade it all for a little more. Perhaps, Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” captures the sentiment a little better, “Everybody’s got a hungry heart, you lay down your money and you play part,” but hungry isn’t exactly the right word to describe it either. Hunger implies some kind of void, a figurative whole each of us tries to fill as we literally fill our bellies. In “Hungry Heart,” the speaker tries to fill that void by leaving his wife and his kids without looking back, taking up with another woman, then leaving her, and repeating the cycle. Further, he does so even knowing that this won’t satisfy him. Later in the song, he states the truth, saying “Everybody needs a place to rest, Everybody wants to have a home, Don’t make no difference what nobody says, Ain’t nobody like to be alone,” even though he’s done everything possible to ensure he has neither. While everybody might have a hungry heart in a sense, there’s equally the sense that the speaker is making excuses for his own behavior, or at least that the hungry heart phenomenon in most cases doesn’t manifest itself as self destructively or counter productively.
Personally, I have no intention of giving anything I have up in the search for something different. There is no void that needs to be filled; no gaping hole requiring something to consume. Indeed, my primary worry as I look to the second half of my life is how to maintain, protect, and expand it in a few places. Hungry, at least in the context of the song, doesn’t fit. Perhaps that sort of thing is simply for younger people. Fortunately or unfortunately, Springsteen has more than one song with heart in the title. There’s a lesser known track recorded three years after “Hungry Heart” that better captures the dynamic, if not in the specifics of the character and story, “Unsatisfied Heart” that went unfortunately unreleased until last year’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums. In this incarnation, the speaker doesn’t leave his beautiful home, wife, and children willingly, what he describes as a “a house of gold, yeah, on a far hillside,” “two beautiful children and a kind and loving wife.” Instead, something from his past that remains unsaid returns unexpectedly, when “One day a man came to town with nothing and nowhere to go, He came to me and he mentioned something I’d done a long time ago.” Foolishly, the speaker invites the man in because he vowed to keep the secret, but perhaps needless to say, that doesn’t eliminate the threat. For an unspecified period, he remains with his wife and children, unable to sleep, “At night I’d lay awake in my wife’s arms, she’d sigh, ‘Joe, you alright?’” but ultimately, the “truth hidden deep within” prompts him to flee, leaving his wife while she slept. Unlike “Hungry Heart,” the speaker isn’t a river that just keeps flowing unaware and unconcerned about where it’s been or where it’s going. The speaker in “Unsatisfied Heart” can’t live knowing what he’s left behind. Instead, he becomes something of a ghost at the outskirts, haunted by it in dreams, “I can see the house where we lived, the building where I used to work. As I draw near, the town’s on fire, lit by a red summer moon, Still feel your arms around me, I wake up in this room.” Ultimately, the song is reduced to the chorus, repeated over and over again, “Can you live with an unsatisfied heart? Can you live with an unsatisfied heart? Can you live with an unsatisfied heart? Can you live with an unsatisfied heart?”
Though the speaker never provides an answer, it’s obvious: You simply have to because you don’t have a choice. Reading between the lines of the song, we get the impression that the speaker’s original sin was some kind of likely illegal shortcut to success, a robbery, a forgery, a shady deal. He wanted more than he had, and he did something about it. While he might’ve thought he’d gotten away with it as he built his life, what he describes as “so carefully,” he did not, and so his unsatisfied heart comes back to haunt him. Figuratively speaking at least, I would think all us are like this to some extent. Though we might not have committed any crimes – as a veteran of the used car business in high school and college I will take the fifth on that one – there is an innate sense that what we’ve achieved in life is built on a lie, that someone can come and it take it because of something we did, even something we said, some decision we made, corner we cut, or whatever will reveal everything after it as a lie, the fruit of the poisoned tree as they say. Stretching the metaphor even further, aging comes with the reality that we don’t feel old in our heads. Our bodies might not be what they once were, but inside we all wonder and worry if we’ll ever truly be adults, that if one of our colleagues at work could look inside our heads, they’d discover that we’re still adolescents, play acting at being serious, trying to hide our immaturity as best we can. As I pass the mid-century mark, both are certainly true for me. Life is such that we know we can’t take anything with us, we know the timing is running out, and so we fear what we have might be taken away even as we strive for more. The result is an unsatisfied heart – not an unsatisfied life, not an unfulfilled dream, not a lack of happiness in our relationships, jobs, and possessions – but what is really the alternative? If you don’t want more and aren’t worried about losing what you have, either you have nothing and aren’t aware there is anything, you have everything and there’s nothing left to achieve, or you’re dead. Assuming I make it through skiing tomorrow, I’m most certainly not dead, and what I want more of than anything else is simple: Time (and a Porsche 911 Targa GTS), but isn’t that always the case?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 