Maintenance and Missionary

There is a common sentiment that life is too short. I don't know where it started or why so many people seem to agree, but as I age and meet more people I am finding that life may be just long enough. Even by the age that we consider mid-life, most people seem to have had enough. There are very few people I know that have reached the crest of the hill and still look ahead with excitement. At a certain point, people stop looking at the road ahead and begin to gaze longingly into the rear-view. I would be more inclined to agree with a statement like, "youth is too short."

We spend our early years waiting for the day that we can call ourselves adults, and when the day finally comes that we can, we begin to forget what it was to be young. Simple pleasures become guilty pleasures, intimate encounters become stale routine, and the quest for fulfillment becomes the struggle for maintenance. None of this has to happen, but it does more often than not. There is a stigma attached to striving for goals that are unlikely to be attained once you have reached a certain age. There comes a time at which you are expected to give up the ghost and plant your roots.

Routine is the greatest enemy of endeavor. (Yes, I just made that one up and I hope it's catchy. Put it in a fortune cookie.) I have found that my life stagnates horribly any time that I fall into a day-to-day routine. A repeating pattern of behaviors disguises the passage of time. When each day is nearly identical to the last, all days that pass might as well have only been one single day. Go to work, come home, have dinner, watch Everybody Loves Raymond, have missionary sex with your spouse and fall asleep on your left side. While this may be an ideal day for somebody, and while there is nothing wrong with missionary sex, it's the repetition of this sequence five times a week that makes life seem too short.

Having such a routine actually works as a crutch for many people. It is an effective distraction from the things that you are NOT doing. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking that your life is complete if you can lull yourself into contentment through a hypnotic sequence of actions that are committed to your emotional muscle-memory. Just know that ten years of this will pass just as quickly as a day.

You can't really make your life any longer than it's going to be. What you can do, though, is to fill it more effectively. One day, instead of watching Everybody Loves Raymond, watch something funny. Whisk your spouse off to the nearest public bathroom and do her from behind over the sink. Go cliff diving. Go trick-or-treating on Christmas morning. Do something to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the machine you have created. Some of the best experiences and fondest memories in your life have probably occurred immediately following the thought, I can't believe I'm doing this.

As we progress through adulthood, those moments become less frequent to the point that we forget that we can still live them. Life becomes about maintaining the things we have already attained and not about chasing personal fulfillment. We often forget that we can do things just because they are pleasurable and not just because they are part of the daily agenda. Slow the clock down by allowing yourself to experience things that are out of the ordinary and life will not seem so short. If you keep on depriving yourself, it's already over.