What Turning 50 Means to Me

Today, I'm turning fifty. The Big Five Oh! I always imagined it would be a momentous day, a milestone of sorts.

Turning twenty was such a milestone. It was then that I finally accepted that I was an adult. It wasn't all joyous. I joked that it was my mid-life crisis. I loved being a teenager in the prime of my life. Twenty didn't mean I had grown old, but it did mean I had grown older. My twenty-year-old brain figured old would come later, say, when I turned fifty.

Turning 50. Fire hazard?

In some respects, the fifty milestone is exactly what I expected. I'm grateful to be alive and acutely aware that a half-century of life lay behind, rather than in front, of me.

The fifty mile-marker comes with some costs. Things don't work as well now as they did years ago. Joints creak and pop. Muscles complain. The brain learns more slowly and forgets more frequently. Hair goes gray or goes away. And eyes refuse to focus on anything within two feet of them.

But the milestone also comes with some perks. My two children and three grandchildren are perks most priceless. I've accumulated fifty years worth of wisdom. I have a home and a good job with great coworkers.

I'm not old enough to have gone mountain climbing with Moses or talk about the weather with Noah, but I did see the end of the Vietnam War, the Berlin Wall come down, Challenger explode, Watergate unfold, President Reagan shot and all 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis. I saw the rise and fall of disco, CB radios, and Netscape Navigator. I witnessed the birth of Nasdaq, MTV, Microsoft, the first test-tube baby and a cloned sheep named Dolly. I saw pocket calculators, personal computers, cell phones and the internet itself invented--not all by Al Gore. :-)

I experienced the bliss of finding the perfect wife and the inconsolable anguish of losing her. Maybe that's what it took for me to finally accept that flesh and blood are not immortal.

Please be safe!

I've seen a lot, done a lot, survived a lot. I've achieved successes and learned from failures. Thanks to modern medicine, I've even defied death.

So, as expected, turning fifty is still a milestone. Yes, in some ways I really do feel old, but in other ways, not so much. I've learned to cherish not only each birthday, but every day. They're all gifts we're not guaranteed to receive.

Turning fifty means I'm alive. And come bliss or heartache, I'll accept that gift and keep living it as best I can.

Curse of the Time-Starved Writer

Hideous.  Oppressive.  A curse worse than most.  A curse inflicted upon the creative souls who love to write.  And I have it.  My guess is you've experienced it too.

The curse?  Life.  Or rather those things that life brings to derail the progress we writers crave.

It's worse than our muses taking a month-long vacation in the tropics while we sit at our desks devoid of the creative sparks that propel our fingers into a furious frenzy of typing.

It's worse than spending weeks polishing dry prose into vibrant excitement while our still unwritten tales slip deeper into the recesses of our minds, waiting.

It's worse than air-starved lungs attempting to breathe fresh, unique life into cardboard characters that stubbornly refuse to be defined by their creators.

It's a nasty little curse, for sure.  And those of us not named J. K. Rowling or Stephen King must endure it.  There are no charms to protect us from it, no voodoo timepieces into which we can poke needles, no incantations we can utter that will dispel it, and no silver bullets with which we can terminate it.  It envelopes us like the very air we breathe. 

It's the lawn that needs mowing, the empty cupboards and refrigerator that needs filling, kids that need a ride to soccer practice, and the office from 9-5 with nights and weekends on call.  Relatives and obligations, unplanned errands and unexpected guests, they're all part of the curse.  It strikes without warning.  It strikes without mercy.

Never enough time.  Squeeze a minute as hard as you can and you'll wring not another single second from it.  Whether time is relative or absolute doesn't matter.  Sixty minutes is all you're going to get from an hour.  There is no more. 

I've heard some say that if you want time, make time.  Alas, my talent for making time ranks right up there with my talent for growing younger.  Oh, what I wouldn't give for a time machine.  Drop in a few quarters, pull a lever and out pops an hour.  That would be better than chocolate!

But alas, we can't make time.  We can't buy it either.  We can only use wisely the time we're given.  That, and nothing else, offsets the power of the time-starved writer's curse.