We’ll Be Dead Soon

Yesterday I strolled along ranch roads as wisps of fog were drifting, clinging like silk scarves to the golden hills, and it felt like a dream. I still had my voice then, which a sudden case of laryngitis has since dissolved, and I decided to stop by and visit my friend Aristotle. His white house sits high on a hilltop with a view of Point Conception, and he calls it Acropolis, a tribute to his Greek origins. We often sit outside on his deck drinking coffee and ranting and philosophizing, and it’s like taking an intermission from life, pressing pause, sitting in the embrace of a pair of parentheses.

Then again, it occurs to me that maybe sitting at Acropolis and talking with my friend is not a break from life but rather what life is supposed to be. What could be more important? And why am I always in such a hurry? I returned from our travels with a huge to-do list and haven’t tackled a single task other than unpacking my suitcases.

Lately it has become real to me that my allotted time on earth is not so very far from its end. I’m not saying this to be dramatic or morbid. It’s just a fact. Facing and accepting it has prompted me to spend the money, make the visit, stop dithering and postponing, do the talked-about impractical things. I ask what it is it that matters now, and what makes me happy, and I proceed accordingly.

Aristotle is just a blink away from ninety, nearly twenty years older than me, but when I mention this perspective to him, he doesn’t make fun of my relative youth and instead commends me on having attained this wisdom early. He recently remodeled an entry room and doorway, a costly job he had contemplated for years but kept putting off because he figured he would only have a few years left to enjoy it. “I’ll be dead soon,” he thought, “So what’s the point?” Now that the work is done, it gives him great pleasure every time he sees the beautiful space: the brightness, the openness, the solid workmanship.

“‘I’ll be dead soon’ has a new meaning to me now,” says Aristotle. “It isn’t what I say to let things slide, but rather my reason for just doing them.”

I’m blue. The goodbyes, the travel, the sense of dislocation…these aftermath periods are hard. But as I walked down the hill from Acropolis, I felt the sweet cool fog-air scented by the sea, and I looked back to see my friend waving to me, his white hair tousled by the breeze, and the sky was blue and white, and I was suspended in a perfect moment, not far from the end of my life, but very much alive.