Ill With Want

Current song obsession: The Avett Brothers' Ill With Want. "I am sick with wanting, and it's evil and it's daunting how I let everything I cherish lay to waste...Something has me...oh, something has me...acting like someone I know isn't me...Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed..."

Welcome to middle age, boys.

By the time you figure out what you've missed, you're stuck with who you are and the choices that led you there, and are faced with the dawning realization that your remaining options, like your years, are far more limited than you thought they'd ever be. Arriving at this place where, to quote The Bard, you are "with what I must enjoy, contented least," you finally understand that there's little to no one to blame but yourself, and that the primary reason for all this is not necessarily what you did, but what you DIDN'T care enough to do.

Which leads to another line from another song that has hit me hard this week. It's from a Mumford & Sons song called I Gave You All: "If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could have won." Apathy is the name of EVERYTHING I've done wrong in or with my life. If only SOMETHING (or something IN me) had moved me, motiviated me, or challenged me to overcome this laziness and complacency--not even love ever seemed enough to do it.

Throughout my life, I have always been, alternatively, both proud and just a little dismayed by the fact that I'm so "even keeled." Until very recently, I never spent a lot of time being emotionally high or low...I tend to just take things as they come. I never got overly sad or angry or tortured about anything, but by the same token, things that elated or brought squeals of transcendant joy from others have always elicited from me a "tamped down" reaction. I'm happy, of course, but my joy levels seem to be wrapped up in the same modulator as my sadness.

And what modulates those feelings? Is it my apathy itself that's causing the interference? Or is it my lack of emotionalism that causes the apathy? Which came first--chicken or egg? Does it even matter?

The saying goes, "It's never too late." But when you're talking about things that are reserved for the truly young and beautiful to experience, that's just not true. "Age is a state of mind," they say. Maybe so, but it's also perfectly and permanently etched on your face. I can THINK I'm 29 and thin and gorgeous all I want to, but it doesn't make it true, and can NEVER make it true. Sometimes you just have to know when to stop hoping and dreaming, and accept the fact that you, via your own apathy, are the only one to blame.

Which leaves us where? Well, there's two choices, I guess: continue to grumble and be "ill with want" and let the things you cherish lay to waste, or snap out of it and start being grateful for the abundance of goodness in your life. Which abundance, in fact, I do have. It's kind of disgraceful that I would even be so selfish and unappreciative. But middle age is definitely a stop & assess time, and one can't help but have their regrets, regardless of the charmed life they've been given. I've thought for years that I was a "grown-up," someone who's responsible and mature and productive. But maybe this is the moment when one truly becomes a grown-up--that moment when you REALLY put childish dreams away, accept that you're a mortal being, and focus your attention on whatever good you have or comes your way in your remaining time.

Sometimes I think religion, or at least the nearly universal idea of an afterlife, plays a large part in our apathy or complacency. It definitely serves a very necessary purpose--if everyone believed this was it, much to Gene Roddenberry's chagrin, we'd probably all be looting & shooting up and doing who knows how many unspeakable things to each other--the general idea of an afterlife that promises not only eternal bliss for the good, but eternal damnation for the wicked is not such a bad thing when you look at the history of evils commited by humans against each other. But the idea that this is NOT all there is also gives you an excuse...you can abdicate responsibility for your own happiness by assuming that whatever you do or whatever gets dished out to you here will be made up for in the afterlife--if you just try to be a good person and/or believe in some form of salvation, you'll go to heaven, and all this will be merely a prelude to an eternal existence of perfection.

Huh.

But if THIS is all there is, how much joy have we robbed ourselves of by believing we'd all get a do-over?

Something to think about...tomorrow.