58

Photo by Stephan Mosel. Some rights reserved.

I turned 58 today. I was partially under the impression, for the last year, that I was already 58, so this seems like a bonus year: I get to be 58 again!

Olivia and I were talking the other day about the number of things that 2024 represents the 10th anniversary of: Ethan the Dog came into our lives; we spent a good part of the summer in Europe, in a VW microbus, one teenager, two adults, and one big dog; Olivia’s first unconference; a Rukavina family gathering in Maine; Olivia started grade 8. And, most significantly, her Mom Catherine was diagnosed with incurable cancer.

If you’d walked by my house late morning yesterday, and looked in the front windows, you would have seen me wildly gesticulating, and yelling “FUCK YOU!!” at the top of my lungs at a Zoom screen in front of me, all part of a very therapeutic coaching relationship I’ve been in since the fall. A lot of what I was yelling about were things that happened the 10 years since 2014; a lot of the things I was yelling about were things that happened well before 2014 that continue to gunk up my chi.

I was thinking this morning, “what if I could go back and give 2014 Pete some advice about how to be more present and alive through the decade I now know the plot of.”

I realized, thinking about it all day, that there’s nothing I could have said that would have been remotely helpful, for it’s not the advice, but the willingness to hear it, that’s the important thing. 

Actions that, from this vantage point, look like cowardice, or shutting down, or selfish escaping, those were actions I needed to protect myself;  protection I needed to do everything that I did manage. 

It was a hard decade this. But did I ever learn a lot, grow a lot, rip pages out of my well-worn rule book of recalcitrance a lot. 

Rather than sending advice back to old Pete, I’ll take this occasion to send advice forward to future Pete, courtesy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

Then indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting o’er lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. 

Fuck yes.