Seeking something monumental

Today is the final day of my 50th year on this planet. For months now I’ve had an urge to do something special before I turned 51, something epic. Perhaps this is what people refer to as a midlife crisis, I don’t know. I don’t think that I’m in any particular state of crisis, but I do often feel as if I have yet to achieve anything particularly monumental, something befitting such a significant landmark as half a century. Some might say that my entire last decade has been anything but typical, but perhaps that’s the problem… when you live life outside the box, it takes ever greater variety to make things stand out as special.

I try to imagine my dad at aged 50. He was old, or at least it seemed that way to me as a 10 year old boy. And that’s funny because now, at 50, I don’t in any way feel old, and I have to imagine that he didn’t either.

Sailing to Patagonia was going to be it, the something special. Well, plans change. Now we have wheels underneath us instead of keels, and are traveling by human power instead of being propelled by the wind or diesel. We’re still making progress towards that same destination though, albeit very slowly, and admittedly, in quite a circuitous route.

In spite of what I had visualized, there will be no great milestone achieved before midnight tonight, nothing to tick off on a bucket list, were I to have one (I don’t), but that’s OK. We’re out here, challenging ourselves daily, and in my mind, that has to be enough.

Read someone else’s tale of cycling and a midlife crisis. It’s pretty good!