Torture of happiness

I have to say I'm not coping well with this "late bloomer" stuff. It's agonizing to find myself in a situation filled with exciting prospects, dreams that are on the brink of fulfillment, stuff coming together that I never actually thought possible while at the same time living in a body and with a brain that try their best to be younger than their years but without complete success. This week has once again brought me incredible intellectual riches -- I've met some dazzlingly smart young people who seem keen to climb aboard at least some part of my freight train. I get so excited that I can't think straight, concentrate, sleep, or pay attention to the long, philosophical monologues of my four year old son on such weighty matters as the colour of his shirt or the roughness of my beard. And then I climb out of bed in the morning onto aching knees, or I find myself standing in front of 200 students who are waiting for an explanation of some subtle aspect of sensory processing with just that tiny nag of uncertainty in the back of my mind that I might come to some key part of an explanation and be just a little bit lost for how to put things. It happens occasionally. I find myself recalling a lecture I heard thirty years ago about aging where it was said that one of the problems with physical aging is not so much the stuff we can't do as the stuff we think we might not be able to do. That little hesitation in your step as you try to run down a flight of stairs is something that I find happens mentally as well. I can't hold as many numbers in my head as before. I can't mentally rotate complicated objects quite as quickly. Or perhaps I just think that I can't. Either way, that little mental stutter can be fatal.

I keep resolving anew to take better care of my body. The food I put into it, the exercise I get, all of it is more important than ever before. I've got important stuff to get done, and it feels a little more like a race than ever before.

And then, at about 10 pm or so, I settle back, pour myself a modest little taste of a great scotch to loosen thoughts and feelings, and I'm momentarily overcome by this need to just relax, let go, stop trying so hard.

My life's more complicated and interesting than it has ever been before. It's a good kind of agony.