Stillness at the apogee

At age 36, I'm about half-way through my life, according to most statistics. True, the men of the baby boom generation are living a bit longer than their grandfathers, but that doesn't mean I will. Anyway, my genes are working against me. Someone once read my palm and came up with 72 for my dyin' day, and since that's a little more than the three-score-and-ten the Bible would have given me, I'll live with it.

So here am I, in the middle of the moment where my youth becomes my age. It's like that point, when you throw a ball up in the air, where it's neither going up, nor coming down anymore. There's a stillness at the apogee.

Not surprisingly, it's a moment in which I seem to be really open to change, to perspective and to insight. I've already shared the fact that I'm making career moves, that are also life moves, and that at the heart of it, it's about who I am and how I live.

Late Saturday night around a deserted campfire at the Shelter Valley Folk Festival, I said a prayer for help and healing on the journey that lies before me. The answer to my prayer was a bolt from the big blue sky the next morning.

I've lived all my life with death. Lots of people I've loved have died, and I've contemplated my own death more closely than is good for you. Just like in my song "Inhuman Race," I've felt chased by my ghost in a race against time. I knew I'd be dying in the end, and there just wasn't time to get it all done. It was a guaranteed failure.

But on Sunday morning, I saw it the other way around. I saw that my life was a guaranteed success! Why? Because it suddenly occurred to me that I would, without question, LIVE all the way to the end.

From the middle of the moment that is eternity springs this temporal space that is my life. I'm going to live it all. Not even death can stop me doing that.