The Journey
Oh what a journey. Fifty circuits ‘round the sun, spinning a thousand miles every day, and then all of that flying and driving and walking. Using grossly wild generalizations and a sputtering calculator, I figure I’ve logged 14-1/2 billion miles so far. My goodness, how far, I’ve come, while so often feeling stuck. And how far there is to go. Sometimes I wonder about the future; what it is, when it will come.
It’s the same frustration of looking out the window of an airliner. At take-off, flying 180 miles per hour, the ground rushes past in a great sense of motion. But at 30,000 feet, flying at 550 miles an hour, the ground moves slowly, giving you a sense of just crawling along. I suppose it has something to do with seeing the horizon. As though it were some kind of milestone in accomplishment or planning. When you’re flying in a small plane, you are always looking for a place to land that is no further than a third of the way to the horizon. That’s about how far you can cruise and maneuver to land, without your engine.
I was hot stuff in my twenties, producing the news for ABC, back when it knew what news was. At another culturally-defining age, thirty, I left a good position on the rise, for the left coast, and what turned into a new life. My fortieth birthday was celebrated in Chicago with my third mother-in-law. And now at fifty, I seem to be filling in some holes in a substantial foundation for what I don’t know. I could guess about, hope for, or be concerned about any variety of circumstances, but I have been so bad at projecting all these years that it now truly seems like a worthless exercise.
Concomitant with the experience of this time-hammered wisdom, I have been moving my center of being to a deeper place. Growing up, it was clear to me that it was my brain that was going to make me, not my athletic body or natural good looks. I not only relied on my head, I resided in it. I knew nothing else, being brought up as I was by a Freudian psychoanalyst and a writer called the Jane Austen of the Twentieth Century.
I was quite successful, using my head. There was no reason to question the eminence of intellect. Until upon my move to the Bay Area. I went through all of my money on basic living expenses because I couldn’t find work. And a five-month second marriage. And I found myself wondering what had happened to my control.
Twenty years later, from a center deeper inside, my view is simple. At every moment, you are on the riverbank of life. You must jump in, but they you have four choices. To swim up stream against the current; eventually you will tire and be dragged downstream, bounced of rocks and trees. To outswim the current, but you’ll tire eventually, and be bounced along downstream. To do nothing in the water but be knocked about on the ride downstream. Or you can swim with the current, use your energy most efficiently, and avoid most of the bumps. Ultimately, it’s not about the time of the journey or the miles covered, but the quality of the experience.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.