I don’t care about living boldly. I just want to live.
A favorite past-time for my husband and me is to talk about what we’re going to do when we retire. I am eager for when my time is my own, to do with what I please. But when I think of actually having that time, on a daily basis, I get kind of freaked out. Our society is achievement-driven and hyperbolic; everything must be bold and brave, epic and adventurous, the fastest, greatest, biggest, most. Are my dreams big enough? What is my “thing” that defines me? What do I aspire to? What’s my passion?
I worry about these things. I worry that I should have a goal in mind for my life, that I have to be moving toward something.
I’m likely more than halfway through my allotted days. As our kids grow up, I become more aware that the number of years I’ll be here is shrinking. By the time I retire, I’ll be even closer to death.
Life is astonishing. I don’t need big and bold and epic to appreciate the nearly incomprehensible fact that we exist. I continually wonder that we are even here, that we live and breathe and create. We create pragmatic things to help us survive, and we create to bring beauty into the world as well. Who thought to create a piano or a saxophone? I mean look at them! The strings and hammers and keys of the piano, the curves and valves and reed of the saxophone. What must have gone into creating these instruments to make the sounds they make to bring them together as music, and for what reason? For pleasure and beauty. I look around the room I sit in, at the photographs on my wall, and the fountain pens I write with, and the lined notebooks, and the lamps and lightbulbs, the smooth glass windows that slide open and shut, the dishwasher that churns away, the language I type and that’s printed in books, and humans invented all of this! We started with rocks and sticks, and now we have laptops and appliances, electric light and indoor plumbing, toothbrushes and tissue boxes, beds and blankets, and it’s all absolutely marvelous. I can’t get over it.
So when I think about retirement, and my existence right now, I don’t want to waste it. I want to be an active participant in life. I don’t think that means I have to be bold or adventurous. I think it can be simpler than that. I can sniff the air, or grow flowers for birds and butterflies. I can seek the beauty and excellence that so satisfies my soul. These bring me deep pleasure and a sense of awe. I can write small things, and build fires, and make nice dinners, and laugh with my family and friends.
I’m weary of thinking that to live life to its fullest, I need a big dream or that I must be bold or that I should be striving towards something. I think what works better for me is to just savor the life I have in the time that I have it.
This is my response to Bloganuary prompt 11: What does it mean to live boldly?
Butterfly Mind 
The saxophone is only about 150 years old actually, which I find pretty interesting. And in the early days, there were a lot more different shapes and sizes than the standard soprano, alto, tenor, baritone we see today. Rahsaan Roland Kirk played the Manzello and Stritch, which were some of these variants. With all of these instruments, they build upon previous versions. The saxophone clearly learned a lot from the clarinet and other woodwinds. The piano was based upon the harpsichord, and so on. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
The thing I marvel about more is coffee. Who on earth decided to open up a huge coffee pod, let the pods dry out, then roast them, and then make them into coffee. So many people must have died trying out new foods years ago. Up until the 1800s, many Americans thought tomatoes were poisonous because they are related to Nightshade. Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a bushel to prove you wouldn’t die
The new Webb space telescope is something to marvel at, but all of these mundane everyday things are marvelous in their own right. Thanks for pointing it out.
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Yes! Exactly! As a risk-averse scaredy-cat, I appreciate that there are folks out there who say, “I wonder what will happen if…” and we get things like coffee and chocolate as a result. One thing I think about is how much time humans had when survival was the only real necessity of life, especially in places where food was plentiful. Boredom likely played a pretty big role in exploration and tinkering.
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Your post title grabbed my attention immediately, and the further I read, the more I realised I was nodding to everything you wrote.
“By the time I retire, I’ll be even closer to death. ” – that is one thing I usually tell people who keep putting off living until they retire…
“…just savor the life I have in the time that I have it” sounds like the best thing to me, although I have to remind myself of it sometimes.
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