It's like I'm sitting at a bus stop waiting for a train
Exactly how I got here is hard to explain
My heart's in the right place, what's left of it I guess
My heart ain't the problem, it's my mind that's a total mess
With these rickety old legs and watery eyes
It's hard to believe that I could pass for anybody's prize
-Rodney Crowell
It Ain't Over Yet
Writing this morning in the middle of a household conversation about car parking. Slipping off by myself somehow gave me magnetic appeal. Everyone is in here. So are the dogs.
There are limits to my sociability. Some folks are energized by these big gatherings. Although I enjoy these Thanksgiving weekends, enjoy them a lot in fact, I also find them exhausting and need a little alone time. Not going to happen soon.
I did have a solitude yesterday driving down the hill from Nashua to Andover. Peg was in the lead vehicle catching up with her friend Laura, while I flew trail down the winding mountain roads in the Honda. It gave me a little time to think, which was nice.
It occurred to me on that highway meditation that I need to step back and take the time to fix some things in my own life. Right now I'm feeling a little like the HMS Victory in prints I remember from my childhood. The Victory, you'll remember was Admiral Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain's signature naval triumph.
It was a triumph that came with a cost, however. Besides costing Nelson his life, the old wooden warship took a beating.
It was probably hard to recall the proud moment she first sailed out of Portsmouth, beginning an adventure that would become the stuff of legend, but mostly wreck the ship in the process.
That's life, isn't it? You start the hero's journey, and a few decades later your neck hurts from all the 9G turns, you're squishy across the middle, worn out with a host of bad habits and dings and dents accumulated over a lifetime. And maybe a busted mast or two.
It's the same with airplanes. Once you hit 2000 hours it's time for the major overhaul, a $50k plus adventure that entails checking every fastener, every wire bundle, the compression of every cylinder. At the end of the process you may end up with the Ship of Theseus, still the same tail number but an assemblage of new parts and pieces.
I'm feeling it's time for dry dock, for a major overhaul. The last few years have included more than their share of sturm und drang, with divorce and remarriage and a massive hurricane, followed by a pandemic that turned life on its head, maybe forever. Things are fine, but I'm thinking I need to take this entire life and roll it into the phase dock, examine every habit and belief, every relationship, every moment that comprises a typical day, and toss out the bad, replace what no longer works, repent and renew. That may mean stepping back during these last dreary weeks of 2021 and billing a little less. The alternative, however, is to keep trying to sail this broken down ship into battles against adversaries with fresh rigging and a young crew, until eventually I'm so shot to pieces that I take a cannonball below the waterline and there won't be any more battles.
We proved in my past life that you can fly a very old airplane into battle so long as you take into account that it's old and devote the time to keeping it airworthy.
I'm no longer airworthy. Time to roll the old body, mind, and spirit into the hangar, take it apart, spread the parts out on the floor, and junk what's broken, polish up what still has a little life yet, and put together something not quite what it was, what I was, at 27, but the best I can be right now.
It's a journey of hope, a statement that we haven't given up just yet, that there's still some life ahead that's worth the effort.
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