The clock is ticking...

This year I have become aware of my own mortality.

I know that’s an odd thing to think about given that I am most likely still on the upward side of things, that according the current life expectancy I am hovering somewhere near a mere third of the way through my own mortality. I don’t necessarily mean that I’m thinking about dying itself, because I have given no particular thought to how and when the end will come, or who inherits my book collection or road bike or computer or cookware if I do. That sort of awareness of mortality, I suspect, will not hit me for many more years.

What I mean is that I’ve suddenly realized that I only have a limited amount of time to do what I want to do in life, and that I’m not going to be able to do it all.

When you are very young, the world is open to you. Almost any future you can imagine for yourself could, in fact, turn out to be real, and you have big dreams. But as you grow older, you realize that big dreams take hard work, and you have to pick and choose which dreams you are willing and able to follow. Your future, while still open, is also considerably narrowed.

The problem is that there is too much to do in life. It’s not that I want to do everything, because I can be perfectly content if at the end of my life I have not learned to knit, climbed Mt. Everest, visited Antarctica, owned my own business, or played a lead role in a production at a community theater. I’ve never really cared to do any of those things in the first place. And it’s probably okay if I never write a novel, sew myself a skirt, travel to Africa, hike the Narrows all the way through, or run a 50-miler. These are all things that would be really cool to do or say I’ve done, but that I don’t necessarily spend my time dreaming about them.

But there are so many things I genuinely want to have done before my existence is through, and I have neither the time nor the will (nor perhaps the ability in some cases) to do them all.

For example, I was out running one day a few weeks back and thinking about places I would like to live, not just visit. I like living in new locations and my comfort zone, which sometimes appears to be quite solid, is nicely counterbalanced by my wanderlust. This wanderlust is not so much a need to travel and see the world as it is a need to become a part of things, or to let new places become a part of me. I spend more time thinking about living somewhere else than I do thinking about traveling destinations. This particular day I was contemplating how much I would love to live in Oregon, and that it might be kind of fun to live in New York City (but not for more than a year) or Boston or Maine or Colorado or Arizona, and it suddenly struck me that my current most-desirable-career-trajectory could very well mean that these few years in Ann Arbor will be followed by a lifetime in Provo or thereabouts. Now, I like Provo—I love the mountains, the seasons are more than tolerable, the communities are quiet, and it is a better place for running than any other city in which I have spent a considerable amount of time—but even if I can see myself as being happy settling there, I feel disappointed by the idea of never getting to try someplace else, disappointed that northern Virginia and Ann Arbor are as far as I’m going to get. Ever. It almost makes me want to reconsider my own most-desirable-career-trajectory.

And speaking of careers, that’s another place where the limits are beginning to make themselves apparent. I have spent almost my entire life imagining what I will be when I grow up, and old habits die hard. After entertaining dreams of being a writer, a pianist, an archaeologist, a photographer, a doctor, a speech therapist, an elementary school teacher, a statistician, a botanist, a history textbook author, a museum curator, a librarian, an astronomer, an architect, an engineer, and a linguist, it’s very hard for me to accept the fact that I’ve actually chosen my career and that I’m no longer free to decide what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up I am going to be a professor of mathematics education. Sometimes I really like that idea (otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen it in the first place), but occasionally I think, “Huh. That’s anticlimactic.”

Even hobbies and interests seem to become limited as I grow older. I spend a pretty significant amount of my time running and reading, for example, but I only have so much spare time and at some point pursuit of interests requires the sacrifice, or at least compromise, of other interests. I can’t begin to tell you how sad it makes me feel that I will never again get to sing in a real choir. I would love to take voice lessons, but I don’t have time right now as a graduate student, and I am afraid that the time for being able to significantly improve my singing ability is running out. I would love to be able to take organ lessons again because all I play nowadays are the hymns. I want to learn to cook (really cook), or learn how to decorate cakes, or learn a new language (or pick Spanish up again, for that matter), or improve my writing and actually do something with it. But every one of these things takes time and effort and practice, and I don’t have enough resources to devote to them. I’ve always known that I can’t do it all right now, and I’m okay with that. But now I’m beginning to realize that there will be many that I won’t be able to do ever. And “ever” is such a permanent word…

Of course, I may feel like I’m running out of time at the moment, but I think it’s because I’m right in the middle of this sudden shift of perspective. I expect that once I can accept that I will not do everything, things will be different. If I expect that I’m going to live out the rest of my life in Provo, then any change in location will be an unexpected fulfillment of a wish, rather than a hope that does not come true. And if I never do more than play hymns in my permanent calling as ward organist, or improve my Spanish, or sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, I may yet find myself drawn to new and exciting interests that have not even crossed my mind at this point. After all, my dad took up skiing and cycling in his forties, and my mom, a college social work major, has recently studied computer science and mathematics and physics, biology, and chemistry. Yes it’s true that the infinite number of paths my life could have taken when I was five, ten, twenty years old have been narrowed down considerably. But the amazing thing about infinity is that you can remove a substantial portion of it and still have infinity left over. The future is still as open as it ever was.