2AM Traffic

It's snowing outside. Everything looks beautiful.

I've sort of entered this phase of life where I think I'm being "smart" about my emotions. Rather than pull a trigger on an impulse I take two steps back and remind myself that it would be silly to make the same mistakes I used to make in my early twenties. I carry myself as though I've been through and seen too much. I step back and watch people who are younger than I am walk through hell to grow up, all the while trying not to tell them that all the pain and confusion and indecision will pass. They have to figure it out on their own. They wouldn't listen to me, and they would have no reason to.

Every time I meet a 24 year old I cringe and ask them if they're freaking out about their lives. I give them the advice that things will change once they hit 27 or so, whether they ask for it or not.

Maybe it's bullshit for me to be thinking that way at all. Since I was a teenager I've been the type of person who loves to give advice based on experience. Imagine a 16 year old giving the "when I was your age" speech. That has been me in a nutshell. You would think a guy like that would be priming himself for fatherhood, but I'd make a lousy dad. I'm still too selfish, too uncertain to be a dad. I take too much pleasure in not taking the world too seriously to cultivate a mind. I'd fuck the kid up.

Being smart about emotion: don't get too worked up, too angry, too sad about anything. Bear all bad news with a slow breath in and out and start the next sentence with, "Okay." I've always been that person too, the one who thinks he can work out any problem by approaching it with a level head, the one who can break down every situation to its bare elements somehow and rebuild it nice and new and happy from the ground up. My early twenties were hell because I felt closer to reason than I ever had but still couldn't grab onto it. I could choose my words carefully, but my relationships would still fail because I didn't understand that I could say too much and drive people away.

The other night I was telling Andrea that I really wasn't still friends with any of the people I called friends when I was 21. During the course of my entire life my friendships have shifted like glaciers, slowly and almost unnoticeable, gradually moving along, in and out of view, sometimes shifting and changing into something else like love or hate or a closeness with another person I hadn't seen coming. It has prevented lifelong friendships from blossoming and I don't know if it will ever stop. I think of my dad, closing in on 70, with no real friends to call his own. He has my mother, his kids and God, and that's it. No more glaciers on the horizon.

I have learned to appreciate what is positive in my life, but at times I feel as though I take the positives for granted and treat others unfairly. I am constantly battling my worry about living a life that is too small in scope with my satisfaction in how many good things I have going for me. I don't want to hide from my own life in relationships or work. Rather, I want these things to be expressive of who I am and how I feel. At times I feel as though I care too much about how others perceive me and how well I'm adjusting to getting older. Most of the time I laugh it off, or fantasize about laughing it off when no one asks me how I'm doing.

Getting older freaks me out. It probably always will, no matter how self-satisfied I become over thinking my way through emotions I once thought were out of control. I always come back to Coupland's words in Life After God:

Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages. But I shouldn't allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room.

Getting older means a continual process of reminding yourself, of giving yourself advice, in order to thwart a negativity that would otherwise destroy any potential you have to be loved.