• Previous posts

  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your thoughtful comments on the last post. The majority of you posted things I want to print and hang on my wall, if not tattoo across my body, because those are the kind of words to live by, no matter what you’re doing. Those of you who delved a bit deeper into career-related details or end goal results, that was really good advice too. I think at this point I’m thinking more about the journey I think sounds meaningful and interesting to me, and less about the specifics of what it all might mean several years down the road—or what might change in the interim.

Small steps: first, see where I’m at with my own dusty, ancient mishmash of dubious collegiate achievement. Who knows, maybe I’ll be complaining to you about suffering through some remedial night course in pre-pre-pre-pre Algebra for Mouthbreathing Idiots soon. God, it sounds awful. God, it sounds . . . kind of wonderful.

Can we make our own second chances? I’m a thousand times more dedicated, disciplined, and excited to learn new things than I ever was at eighteen. Or twenty-eight. What might it feel like to spend my nights doing homework again, this time actually giving a damn about it? What might it feel like to actually pass those groundwork classes I dropped out of, all those years ago? What might it feel like to eventually ace a class in something that’s tapped into what really turns me on? Goddamn, even if I’m the oldest motherfucker in the entire school, what might that feel like?

I know it’s not necessary to go back to school to change careers. I know I make more money in my current field than I’d probably ever make as a fitness/health professional. And maybe adding school—even one class!—into my life would be a terrible mistake, the tipping point of what I can handle and crash, all the carefully-juggled balls come down at once.

But like many of you said: life is short. I’d rather have tried something and discovered it didn’t work than live with regrets. I could sit back and dream about everything that could have been . . . I could wait until some mystical “perfect” time . . . or I could plan the very next step.

There’s a quote I keep thinking of lately, by a crazy ultrarunner dude named Dean Karnazes. It may not speak to you, but it sure means a lot to me.

“We think that if we had every comfort available to us, we’d be happy. We equate comfort with happiness. And now we’re so comfortable we’re miserable. There’s no struggle in our lives. No sense of adventure. What I’ve found is that I’m never more alive than when I’m pushing and I’m in pain, and I’m struggling for high achievement, and in that struggle I think there’s a magic.”

What if at almost 36 years of age you are finally starting to get a vague idea of what you might want to be when you grow up, and a conversation with a friend gets you thinking about what it might take to change paths altogether? What if the things you might want to learn and do involve giant vats of both money and time, neither of which you have to spare? What if it would take a massive, terrifying effort simply to fulfill the prerequisites for an exercise/wellness degree, never mind the curriculum itself, which involves, like, science? What if it seemed absolutely one hundred percent impossible, that you’d never be able to afford it or somehow shoehorn it into a life that is already packed to capacity with family and work and everything else?

What would you do?

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